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THE CARE AND CULTURE 
OF MEN 

A SERIES OF ADDRESSES 

ON THK 

HIGHER EDUCATION 



BY 

DAVID STARR JORDAN 

President of Leland Stanford Junior University 
AND OF THB California Academv of Sciences 



•* The best Political Economy is the care and culture of men!'' 

—Emerson. 




SAN FRANCISCO 
THE WHITAKER & RAY COMPANY 

(INCORPOKATKD) 
1896 






1^ 



■ \P ^»^ 



Copyright, 1896 

BY 

David Starr Jordan 



TO 
JANE LATHROP STANFORD 



PREFATORY NOTE. 

This volume is made up of addresses relating to higher 
education, delivered at different times before assemblies of 
teachers and students. The writer is under obligation to the 
publishers of the Popular Science Monthly, the Forum, and 
the Occidental Medical Times for the permission to reprint 
articles which have appeared in these periodicals. The arti- 
cle on "The Evolution of the College Curriculum," first 
pubhshed in ** Science Sketches," is here reprinted by con- 
sent of A. C. McClurg & Co., and that on "The Higher 
Education of Women" is reprinted by consent of the Irving 
Syndicate. Most of the articles have been freely retouched 
since their original publication. 

Palo Alto, Cal., May 14, 1896. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

I. The Value of Higher Education i 

II. The Evolution of the College Curriculum 24 

III. The Nation's Need of Men 57 

IV. The Care and Culture of Men 67 

V. The Scholar in the Community 76 

VI. The School and the State • . 95,, 

VII. The Higher Education of Women 123 

VIII. The Training of the Physician 133 

IX. Law Schools and Lawyers 150 

X. The Practical Education 163 

XI. Science in the High School . . * 173 

XII. Science and the Colleges 183 

XIII. The Procession of Life 203 

XIV. The Growth of Man 208 

XV. The Social Order 2:18 

XVI. The Saving of Time 236 

XVII. The New University 259 

XVIII. A Castle in Spain 268 



THE CARE AND CULTURE OF MEN, 



I. 
THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION. 

WHAT I have to say here is addressed to young 
men and young women. It is a plea, as strong 
as I know how to make it, for higher education, for more 
thorough preparation for the duties of life. I know those 
well to whom I wish to speak. And to such as these, 
with the life and duties in the busy world before you, 
the best advice I or any one can give is this: *' Go to 
college." 

And you may say : *' These four years are among the 
best of my life. The good the college does must be 
great, if I should spend this time and money in securing 
it. What will the college do for me ? " 

It may do many things for you, — if you are made of 
the right stuff; for you cannot fasten a two-thousand- 
dollar education to a fifty-cent boy. The fool, the dude, 
and the shirk come out of college pretty much as they 
went in. They dive deep in the Pierian springs, as the 
duck dives in the pond, — and they come up as dry as 
the duck does. The college will not do everything for 

*Address before the California State Teachers' Association at Fresno, 1892. 
B I 



2 THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION. 

you. It is simply one of the helps by which you can 
win your way to a noble manhood or womanhood. 
Whatever you are, you must make of yourself; but a 
well-spent college life is one of the greatest helps to all 
good things. 

So, if you learn to use it rightly, this the college can 
do for you: It will bring you in contact with the great 
minds of the past, the long roll of those who, through 
the ages, have borne a mission to young men and young 
women, from Plato to Emerson, from Homer and Eu- 
ripides to Schiller and Browning. Your thought will be 
limited not by the narrow gossip of to-day, but the great 
men of all ages and all climes will become your brothers. 
You will learn to feel what the Greek called the * * conso- 
lations of philosophy." To turn from the petty troubles 
of the day to the thoughts of the masters, is to go from 
the noise of the street through the door of a cathedral. 
If you learn to unlock these portals, no power on earth 
can take from you the key. The whole of your life must 
be spent in your own company, and only the educated 
man is good company for himself. The uneducated 
man looks out on life through narrow windows, and thinks 
the world is small. 

The college can bring you face to face with the great 
problems of nature. You will learn from your study of 
nature's laws more than the books can tell you of the 
grandeur, the power, the omnipotence of God. You 
will learn to face great problems seriously. You will 
learn to work patiently at their solution, though you 
know that many generations must each add its mite to 
your work before any answer can be reached. 

Your college course will bring you in contact with 



THE IDEAL TEACHER. 3 

men whose influence will strengthen and inspire. The 
ideal college professor should be the best man in the 
community. He should have about him nothing mean, 
or paltry, or cheap. He should be to the student as 
David Copperfield's Agnes, ''always pointing the way 
upward,' ' 

That we are all this, I shall not pretend. Most col- 
lege professors whom I know are extremely human. 
We have been soured, and starved, and dwarfed in many 
ways, and many of us are not the men we might have 
been if we had had your chances for early education. 
But unpractical, pedantic, fossilized though the college 
professor may be, his heart is in the right place ; he is 
not mercenary, and his ideals are those of culture and 
progress. We are keeping the torch burning which you, 
young men of the twentieth century, may carry to the 
top of the mountain. 

But here and there among us is the ideal teacher, 
the teacher of the future, the teacher to have known 
whom is of itself a liberal education. I have met some 
such in my day — Louis Agassiz, Charles Frederick 
Hartt, Asa Gray, George William Curtis, James Rus- 
sell Lowell, Andrew Dickson White, among others, and 
there are many more such in our land. It is worth ten 
years of your life to know well one such man as these. 
Garfield once said that a log with Mark Hopkins at one 
end of it and himself at the other, would be a university. 
In whatever college you go, poor and feeble though 
the institution may be, you will find some man who, in 
some degree, will be to you what Mark Hopkins was 
to Garfield. To know him will repay you for all your 
sacrifices. It was said of Dr. Nott, of Union College, 



4 THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION. 

that he "took the sweepings of other colleges, and 
sent them back into society pure gold." Such was his 
influence on young men. 

Moreover, the training which comes from association 
with one's fellow-students cannot be overestimated. Here 
and there, it is true, some young invertebrate, overbur- 
dened with money or spoiled by home-coddling, falls 
into bad company, and leaves college in worse condition 
than when he entered it. These are the windfalls of 
education. However much we may regret them, we 
cannot prevent their existence. But they are few among 
the great majority. Most of our apples are not worm- 
eaten at the core. The average student enters college 
for a purpose ; and you will lose nothing, but may gain 
much, from association with him. Among our college 
students are the best young men of the times. They 
mold each other's character, and shape each other's 
work. Many a college man will tell you that, above all 
else which the college gave, he values the friendships 
which he formed in school. In the German universities, 
the ' ' fellow-feeling among free spirits ' ' is held to be one 
of the most important elements in their grand system 
of higher education. 

Many a great genius has risen and developed in soli- 
tude, as the trailing arbutus grows in the woods and 
scorns cultivation. Poets sing because their souls are 
full of music, not because they have learned the gamut 
of passions in schools. But all great work, in science, 
in philosophy, in the humanities, has come from enter- 
ing into the work of others. 

There was once a Chinese emperor who decreed that 
he was to be the first; that all history was to begin 



ENTERING INTO THE WORK OF OTHERS. 5 

with him, and that nothing should be before him. But 
we cannot enforce such decree. We are not emperors 
of China. The world's work, the world's experience 
does not begin with us. We must know what has been 
done before. We must know the paths our predeces- 
sors have trodden, if we would tread them farther. We 
must stand upon their shoulders — dwarfs upon the shoul- 
ders of the giants — if we would look farther into the 
future than they. Science, philosophy, statesmanship 
cannot for a moment let go of the past. 

The college intensifies the individuality of a man. It 
takes his best abilities and raises him to the second, or 
third, or tenth power, as we say in algebra. It is true 
enough that colleges have tried, and some of them still 
try, to enforce uniformity in study — to cast all students 
in the same mold. Colleges have been conservative, 
old-fogyish, if you please. Musty old men in the dust 
of Hbraries have tried to make young men dry and 
dreary like themselves. Colleges have placed readi- 
ness above thoroughness, memory above mastery, glib- 
ness above sincerity, uniformity above originality, and 
the dialectics of the dead past above the work of the 
Hving present The scepter of the Roman emperor has 
crumbled into dust, but the * ' rod of the Roman school- 
master is over us still. ' ' 

But say what you will of old methods, they often at- 
tained great ends. Colleges have aimed at uniformity. 
They did not secure it. The individuality of the stu- 
dent bursts through the cast-iron curriculum. '*The 
man's the man for a' that," and the man is so much 
more the man nature meant him to be, because his mind 
is trained. 



6 THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION. 

The educated man has the courage of his convictions, 
because only he has any real convictions. He knows 
how convictions should be formed. What he believes 
he takes on his own evidence — not because it is the 
creed of his church or the platform of his party. So he 
counts as a unit in his community — not as part of a 
dozen or a hundred whose opinions are formed by their 
town's place on the map, or who train under the party 
flag because their grandfathers did the same. * * To see 
things as they really are, ' ' is one of the crowning priv- 
ileges of the educated man, and to help others to see 
them so, is one of the greatest services he can render to 
the community. 

But you may say: "All this may be fine and true, 
but it does not apply in my case. I am no genius; I 
shall never be a scholar. I want simply to get along. 
Give me education enough to teach a district school, or 
to run an engine, or to keep account-books, and I am 
satisfied. Any kind of a school will be good enough for 
that.'* 

* ' The youth gets together his materials, ' ' says Tho- 
reau, * ' to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance a 
palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle- 
aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them. ' ' 

Now, why not plan for a woodshed at first, and save 
this waste of time and materials ? 

But this is the very good of it. The gathering of 
these materials will strengthen the youth. It may be 
the means of saving him from idleness, from vice. So 
long as you are at work on your bridge to the moon, 
you will shun the saloon, and we shall not see you on 
the dry-goods box in front of the corner-grocery. I 



THE MAN WHO CAN WILL. 7 

know many a man who in early life planned only to build 
a woodshed, but who found later that he had the strength 
to build a temple, if he only had the materials. Many 
a man the world calls successful would give all life has 
brought him could he make up for the disadvantages 
of his lack of early training. It does not hurt a young 
man to be ambitious in some honorable direction. In 
the pure-minded youth, ambition is the sum of all the 
virtues. Lack of ambition means failure from the 
start. The young man who is aiming at nothing, and 
cares not to rise, is already dead. There is no hope for 
him. Only the sexton and the undertaker can serve his 
purposes. 

The old traveler, Rafinesque, tells us that, when he 
was a boy, he read the voyages of Captain Cook, and 
Pallas, and Le Vaillant, and his soul was fired with the 
desire to be a great traveler like them. ** And so I be- 
came such," he adds shortly. 

If you say to yourself, ' ' I will be a naturalist, a 
traveler, an historian, a statesman, a scholar"; if you 
never unsay it; if you bend all your powers in that 
direction, and take advantage of all those aids that help 
toward your ends, and reject all that do not, you will 
some time reach your goal. The world turyis aside to 
let any vian pass who knows whither he is going. 

*'Why should we call ourselves men," said Mira- 
beau," unless it be to succeed in everything, every- 
where? Say of nothing, *This is beneath me,' nor feel 
that anything is beyond your powers. Nothing is im- 
possible to the man who can will. ' ' 

"But a college education costs money," you may say. 
** I have no money; therefore, I cannot go to college." 



8 THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION. 

But this is nonsense. If you have health and strength, 
and no one dependent on you, you cannot be poor. 
There is, in this country, no greater good luck that a 
young man can have than to be thrown on his own re- 
sources. The cards are stocked against the rich man's 
son. Of the many college men who have risen to prom- 
inence in my day, very few did not lack for money 
in college. I remember a little boarding-club of the 
students at Cornell, truthfully called the " Struggle for 
Existence," and named for short, ''The Strug," which 
has graduated more bright minds than any other single 
organization in my Alma Mater. 

The young men who have fought their way, have 
earned their own money, and know what a dollar costs, 
have the advantage of the rich. They enter the world 
outside with no luxurious habits, with no taste for idle- 
ness. It is not worth while to be born with a silver 
spoon in your mouth, when a litde effort will secure you 
a gold one. The time, the money that the unambitious 
young man wastes in trilling pursuits or in absolute idle- 
ness will suilice to give the ambitious man his education. 
The rich man's son may enter college with better prep- 
aration than you. He may wear better clothes. He may 
graduate younger. But the poor man's son can make 
up for lost time by greater energy and by the greater 
clearness of his grit. He steps from the commencement 
stage into no unknown world. He has already measured 
swords with the great antagonist, and the first victory is 
his. It is the first struggle that counts. 

But it is not poverty that helps a man. There is no 
virtue in poor food or shabby clothing. It is the effort 
by which he throws off the yoke of poverty that en- 



THE COW'S MAN. 9 

larges the powers. It is not hard work, but work to a 
purpose, that frees the soul. If the poor man lie down 
in the furrow and say: " I won't try. I shall never 
amount to anything. I am too poor; and if I wait to 
earn money, I shall be too old to go to school." If you 
do this, I say, you won' t amount to anything, and later 
in life you will be glad to spade the rich man's garden 
and to shovel his coal at a dollar a day. 

I have heard of a poor man in Wisconsin who earns a 
half-dollar every day by driving a cow to pasture. He 
watches her all day as she eats, and then drives her 
home at night. This is all he does. Put here your 
half-dollar and there your man. The one balances the 
other, and the one enriches the world as much as the 
other. If it were not for the cow, the world would not 
need that man at all! 

A young man can have no nobler ancestry than one 
made up of men and women who have worked for a liv- 
ing and who have given honest work. The instinct of 
industry runs in the blood. Naturalists tell us that the 
habits of one generation may be inherited by the next, 
reappearing as instincts. Whether this be literally true 
or not, this we know: it is easy to inherit laziness. No 
money or luck will place the lazy man on the level of his 
industrious neighbor. The industry engendered by the 
pioneer life of the last generation is still in your veins. 
Sons and daughters of the Western pioneers, yours is 
the best blood in the realm. You must make the most 
of yourselves. If you cannot get an education in four 
years, take ten years. It is worth your while. Your 
place in the world will wait for you till you are ready to 
fill it Do not say that I am expecting too much of the 



lo THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION. 

effects of a firm resolution; that I give you advice which 
will lead you to failure. For the man who will fail will 
never make a resolution. Those among you whom fate 
has cut out for nobodies are the ones who will never try ! 

I said just now that you cannot put a two-thousand- 
dollar education on a fifty-cent boy. This has been tried 
again and again. It is tried in every college. It fails 
almost every time. What of that ? It does not hurt to 
try. A few hundred dollars is not much to spend on an 
experiment like that; — the attempt to make a man out 
of a boy whose life might otherwise be a waste of so 
much good oxygen. 

But what shall we say of a man who puts a fifty-cent 
education on a ten-thousand-dollar, a million-dollar boy, 
and narrows and cramps him throughout his after life ? 
And just this is what ten thousand parents to-day in Cali- 
fornia are doing for their sons and daughters. Twenty 
years hence, ten thousand men and women of California 
will blame them for their shortness of sight and narrow- 
ness of judgment, in weighing a few paltry dollars, soon 
earned, soon lost, against the power which comes from 
mental training. 

" For a man to have died who might have been wise 
and was not — this," says Carlyle, " I call a tragedy." 

Another thing which should never be forgotten is this : 
A college education is not a scheme to enable a man to 
live without work. Its purpose is to help him to work 
to advantage — to make every stroke count. I have 
heard a father say sometimes : "I have worked hard 
all my life. I will give my boy an education, so that he 
will not have to drudge as I have had to do." And the 
boy going out in the world does not work as his father 



THE MAXIMS OF LOW PRUDENCE. ii 

did. The result every time is disappointment ; for the 
manhood which the son attains depends directly on his 
own hard work. But if the father says : " My son shall 
be a worker, too; but I will give him an education, so 
that his work may count for more to himself and to the 
world than my work has done for me." Then, if the 
son be as persistent as his father, the results of his work 
may be far beyond the expectations of either. The boys 
who are sent to college often do not amount to much. 
From the boys who go to college come the leaders of 
the future. 

Frederic Denison Maurice tells us that * * All experi- 
ence is against the notion that the means to produce a 
supply of good, ordinary men is to attempt nothing 
higher. I know that nine-tenths of those the university 
sends out must be hewers of wood and drawers of water; 
but if I train the ten-tenths to be such, then the wood 
will be badly cut, and the water will be spilt. Aim at 
something noble. Make your system of education such 
that a great man may be formed by it, and there will be 
a manhood in your little men of which you did not 
dream ! ' ' 

"You will hear every day around you," says Emer- 
son, "the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear that 
your first duty is to get land and money, place and name. 
'What is this truth you seek? What is this beauty ? ' 
men will ask in derision. If, nevertheless, God has 
called any of you to explore truth and beauty, be bold, 
be firm, be true! When you shall say, 'As others do, 
so will I. I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions. 
I must eat the good of the land and let learning and 
romantic expectations go until a more convenient season. ' 



12 THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, 

Then dies the man in you. Then once more perish the 
buds of art, and poetry, and science, as they have died 
already in a hundred thousand men. The hour of that 
choice is the crisis of your destiny." 

But you may ask me this question : * ' Will a college 
education pay, considered solely as a financial invest- 
ment?" 

Again I must answer, ' ' Yes. ' ' But the scholar is sel- 
dom disposed to look upon his power as a financial 
investment. He can do better than to get rich. The 
scholar will say, as Agassiz said to the Boston publisher, 
' ' I have no time, sir, to make money. ' ' 

But in the rank and file it is true that the educated 
men get the best salaries. In every field, from football 
to statesmanship, it is always science that wins the game. 
Brain-work is higher than hand-work, and it is worth 
more in any market. The man with the mind is the 
boss, and the boss receives a larger salary than the hands 
whose work he directs. 

George William Curtis has said: "I have heard it 
said that liberal education does not promote success in 
life. A chimney-sweep might say so. Without educa- 
tion he could gain the chimney-top — poor little blacka- 
moor! — brandish his brush and sing his song of escape 
from soot to sunshine. But the ideal of success meas- 
ures the worth of the remark that it may be attained 
without liberal education. If the accumulation of money 
be the standard, we must admit that a man might make 
a fortune in a hundred ways without education. But 
he could make a fortune, also, without purity of life, or 
noble character, or lofty faith. A man can pay much too 
high a price for money, and not every man who buys 



PRACTICAL WORTH. 13 

it knows its relative value with other possessions. Un- 
doubtedly, Ezra Cornell and Matthew Vassar did not go 
to college, and they succeeded in life. But their success 
— what was it? Where do you see it now? Surely not 
in their riches, but in the respect that tenderly cherishes 
their memory, because, knowing its inestimable value, 
they gave to others the opportunity of education which 
had been denied to them." 

Some time ago. Chancellor Lippincott, of the State 
University of Kansas, wrote to each of the graduates 
of that institution, asking them to state briefly the ad- 
vantages which their experience showed that they have 
derived from their college life and work. 

Among these answers, I may quote a few: 

One says : * ' My love for the State grew with every 
lesson I received through her care. I saved five years 
of my life by her training, and I am a more loyal and 
a better citizen." 

Another says this: *'I have a better standing in 
the community than I could have gained in any other 
way. ' * 

Another says : "I would not exchange the advantages 
gained for a hundred times their cost, either to Kansas 
or to myself." 

Another declares: **It is financially the best invest- 
ment I ever made. ' ' 

To another it had given ''strong friendship with the 
most intelligent young men of the State, those who are 
certain to largely influence its destiny.' ' 

One said: *' It has given me a place and an influence 
among a class of men whom I could not otherwise reach 
at all." 



14 THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION. 

Another said: ** I am better company for myself, and 
a better citizen, with far more practical interest in the 
State." 

Thus it is in Kansas, and thus it is everywhere. To 
the young man or young woman of character, the col- 
lege education does pay, from whatever standpoint you 
may choose to regard it. 

When I was a boy on a farm in Western New York, 
some one urged my parents to send me to college. 
" But what will he find to do when he gets through col- 
lege?" they asked. *' Never mind that," a friend said; 
' ' he will always find plenty to do. There is always room 
at the top." There is always room at the top! All our 
professions are crowded in America, but the crowd is 
around the bottom of the ladder! 

We are proud, and justly proud, of our common- 
school system. The free school stands on every North- 
ern cross-road, and it is rapidly finding its way into the 
great New South. Every effort is made for the educa- 
tion of the masses. There is no upper caste to reap the 
benefits of an education, for which the poor man has to 
pay. There is no class educated and ruling by right of 
birth — no hereditary House of Lords. Our scholars 
and our leaders are of the people, from the people. The 
American plan is making us an intelligent people, as 
compared with the masses of any other nation. The 
number of those indifferent or ignorant is less in our 
Northern States than in England, or Germany, or France. 
But our leadership is worse than theirs. We have, for 
our numbers, fewer educated men than they have in any 
of these countries. Our statesmen are but children by 
the side of Gladstone or Bismarck. We are all too 



WASTE OF UNTRAINED TALENT. 15 

familiar with the American type of * * statesman. ' ' The 
cross-ties of the railroads which lead in every direction 
out of Washington are every fourth year graven with 
the prints of his returning boot-heels. He is the butt 
of our national jokes, as well as the sign of our national 
shame ! We have been too busy chopping our trees and 
breaking our prairies to educate our sons. Thus it 
comes, that in literature, in science, in philosophy, in 
everything except mechanical invention, American work 
has been contented to bear the stamp of mediocrity. 

This is not so true as it was a few years ago; for Young 
America has made great strides toward the front in all 
these fields within the last twenty years. But it should 
not be true to any extent at all. Nowhere in the world, 
I believe, is the raw material out of which scholars and 
statesmen should be made so abundant as in America. 
Nowhere is native intelligence and energy so plentiful; 
but far too often does it waste itself in unworthy achieve- 
ment. The journalist Sala says that "nowhere in the 
world is so much talent lying around loose as in Amer- 
ica." In other words, in no other country are so many 
men of natural ability who fail in effectiveness in life for 
want of proper training. 

In the different training-schools of California, large 
and small, nearly two thousand young people are 
gathered together to prepare for the profession of teach- 
ing. Of these, not one in fifty remains in school long 
enough to secure even the rudiments of a liberal educa- 
tion. Fifteen minutes for dinner; fifty weeks for an 
education! For the lowest grades of schools, there are 
candidates by the hundred; but when one of our really 
good schools wants a man for a man's work, it can make 



i6 THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION. 

no use of these teachers. We must search far and wide 
for the man to whom a present offer of fifty dollars a 
month has not seemed more important than all the grand 
opportunities the scholar may receive. Many of our 
young teachers are making a mistake in this regard. 
Every year the demand for educated men and women in 
our profession is growing. Every year scores of half- 
educated teachers are crowded out of their places to 
make way for younger men who have the training which 
the coming years demand. What kind of a teacher do 
you mean to be? One who has a basis of culture, and 
will grow as the years go on, or one with nothing in 
him, who will hang on, a burden to the profession, until 
he is finally turned out to starve ? What is the use of 
preparing for certain failure ? The bird in the hand is 
not worth ten in the bush. You cannot afford to sell 
your future at so heavy a discount. 

The general purpose of public education, it is said, is 
the elevation of the masses. This is well; but as the 
man is above the mass,, there is a higher aim than this. 
Training of the individual is to break up the masses, to 
draw from the multitude the man. We see a regiment 
of soldiers on parade — a thousand men; in dress and 
mein all are alike — the mass. To the sound of the drum 
or the command of the officer, they move as one man. 
By and by, in the business of war, comes the cry for a 
man to lead some forlorn hope, to do some deed of 
bravery in the face of danger. From the mass steps the 
man. His training shows itself. On parade, no more, 
no less than the others; he stands above them all on the 
day of trial. So, too, in other things, in other places; 
for the need of men is not alone on the field of battle. 



BREAK UP THE MASSES. 17 

Some fifty thousand boys are to-day at play on the 
fields of California. Which of these shall be the great, 
the good of California's next century ? Which of these 
shall redeem our State from its vassalage to the saloon 
and the spoilsman ? Which of these shall be a center of 
sweetness and light; so that the world shall say, " It is 
good to have lived in California." Good not alone for 
the climate, the mountains, the forest, and the sea, the 
thousand beauties of nature which make our State so 
lovable; but good because life in California is life among 
the best and truest of men and women. This record 
California has yet to make; and there are some among 
you, I trust, who will live to help make it. 

These fifty thousand boys form a part of what will be 
the masses. Let us train them as well as we can. Let us 
feed them well. Let us send them to school. Let us 
make them wise, intelligent, clean, honest, thrifty. Among 
them here and there is the future leader of men. Let us 
raise him from the masses, or, rather, let us give him a 
chance to raise himself; for the pine-tree in the thicket 
needs no outside help to place its head above the chapar- 
ral and sumac. To break up the masses, that they may 
be masses no more, but living men and women, is the 
mission of higher education. 

In medicine, America is still the paradise of quacks. 
In law, the land is full of shysters and pettifoggers, and 
doers of ** fine work" ; but of good lawyers, the supply 
never equals the demand. In education, no land is so 
full as America of frauds and shams. The catalogues of 
our schools read like the advertisements of our patent 
medicines. They "cure all ills that flesh is heir to; one 
bottle sufficient!" The name "University" in America 
c 



i8 THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION. 

is assumed by the cross-roads academy as well as by 
Harvard or Johns Hopkins. The name ' * Professor ' ' is 
applied to the country schoolmaster, the barber, and the 
manager of the skating-rink. The bachelor's diploma 
in half our States is given by consent of law to those who 
could not pass the examinations of any decent high 
school. Such diplomas do not ennoble their holders, 
but they do serve to bring into contempt the very name 
of American graduate. 

One of the besetting sins of American life is its will- 
ingness to call very little things by very large names — 
its tolerance of imposition and fraud. It is the mission 
of the scholar in each profession to combat fraud; to 
show men "facts amid appearances " ; to say that a pop- 
gun is a pop-gun, though every one else may be calling 
it a cannon! As our country grows older, perhaps the 
number of bladders will diminish. If not, let us have 
more pins! 

What does the college do for the moral, the religious 
training of the youth? Let us examine. If your 
college assume to stand in loco parentis^ with rod in 
hand and spy-glasses on its nose, it will not do much 
in the way of moral training. The fear of punishment 
will not make young men moral and religious; still less 
a punishment so easily evaded as the discipline of the 
college. 

If your college claims to be a reform school, your pro- 
fessors detective officers, and your president a chief of 
police, the students will give them plenty to do. . A col- 
lege cannot take the place of the parent. To claim that 
it does so, is a mere pretense. It can cure the boy of 
petty vices and childish trickery only by making him a 



RELIGIOUS TRAINING, 19 

man, by giving him higher ideals, more serious views 
of life. You may win by inspiration, not by fear. 

Take those dozen students, of whom Agassiz tells us 
— his associates in the University of Munich. Do you 
suppose that Dr. Dollinger caught any of them cheating 
on examination ? Did the three young men who knelt 
under the haystack at Williamstown, — the founders of 
our Foreign Missions, — choose the haystack rather than 
the billiard-hall, for fear of the college faculty ? ' ' Free 
should the scholar be, free and brave." *'The petty 
restraints that may aid in the control of college sneaks 
and college snobs are an insult to college men and 
women. ' ' And it is for the training of men and women 
that the college exists. 

So, too, In religious matters. The college can do 
much, but not by rules and regulations. The college 
will not make young men religious by enforced attend- 
ance at church or prayer-meeting. It will not awaken 
the spiritual element in the student's nature by any sys- 
tem of demerit-marks. This the college can do for 
religious culture : It can strengthen the student in his 
search for truth. It can encourage manliness in him by 
the putting away of childish things. Let the thoughts 
of the student be as free as the air. Let him prove 
all things, and he will hold fast to that which is good. 
Give him a message to speak to other men, and when 
he leaves your care you need fear for him, not the world, 
the flesh, nor the Devil! 

This is a practical age, we say, and we look askance at 
dreams and ideals. We ask now: What is the value of 
education? What is the value of Christianity? What is 
the value of love, of God, of morality, of truth, of beau- 



20 THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION. 

ty ? — as though all these things were for sale in our city 
markets, somewhat shop-worn and going at a sacrifice. 

"My son," says Victor Cherbuliez, "my son, we 
ought to lay up a stock of absurd enthusiasms in our 
youth, or else we shall reach the end of our journey 
with an empty heart; for we lose a great many of them 
by the way." 

It is the noblest mission of all higher education, I be- 
lieve, to fill the mind of the youth with these enthusiasms, 
with noble ideas of manhood, of work, of life. It should 
teach him to feel that life is indeed worth living; and 
no one who leads a worthy life has ever for a moment 
doubted this. It should help him to shape his own 
ambitions as to how a life may be made worthy. It 
should help him to believe that love, and friendship, and 
faith, and devotion are things that really exist, and are 
embodied in men and women. He should learn to know 
these men and women, whether of the present or of the 
past, and his life will become insensibly fashioned after 
theirs. He should form plans of his own work for so- 
ciety, for science, for art, for religion. His life may fall 
far short of what he would make it; but a high ideal 
must precede any worthy achievement. 

A conviction or ideal in life must be a determination 
to work and live toward some end. It must express 
itself in action. It is destructive of mind and soul if 
an ideal stands in the place of effort. No visions and 
dreams uncontrolled by the will can be treated as 
independent sources of knowledge or power. 

I once climbed a mountain slope in Utah, in midsum- 
mer, when every blade of grass was burned to a yellow 
crisp. I look over the valley, and here and there I 



LENDING A HAND. 21 

can trace a line of vivid green across the fields, running 
down to the lake. I cannot see the water, but I know 
that the brook is there ; for the grass would not grow 
without help. Like this brook in the hot plains, may- 
be the life of the scholar in the world of men. 

I look out over the struggling men and women. I 
see the weary soul, the lost ambitions, 

"The haggard face, the form that drooped and fainted 
In the fierce race for wealth." 

Here and there I trace some line In life along which I 
see springing up all things good and gracious. Here 
is the scholar's work. In his pathway are all things 
beautiful and true — the love of nature, the love of man, 
the love of God. For best of all the scholar's privileges 
is that of * ' lending a hand. ' ' The scholar travels the 
road of life well equipped in all which can be helpful to 
others. He may not travel that road again (you remem- 
ber the words of the old Quaker), and what he does for 
his neighbor must be done where his neighbor is. The 
noblest lives have left their traces, not only in literature 
or in history, but in the hearts of men. '' If the teacher 
is to train others, still more must he train himself. The 
teacher's influence depends not on what he says, nor on 
what he does, but on what he is. He cannot be greater 
or nobler than himself He cannot teach nobly if he 
is not himself noble. " * 

Not long ago, Professor William Lowe Bryan said: 
"Two summers since, in a Southern Indiana country 
neighborhood, I came upon the traces of a man. They 
were quite as distinct and satisfactory as a geologist 

* Dr. Weldon, Head Master of Harrow. 



22 THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION. 

could have wished for in the case of a vanished glacier. 
A good many years had passed away since the man was 
there, but the impression of his mind and character was 
still unmistakable. Long ago, when a boy of eighteen, 
with no special training and no extended education, this 
man went to Jefferson County to teach. What he did, 
what he said, what methods or text-books he used, what 
books or journals he read, I do not know. But if you 
will go there to-day, you will find in that community, 
among all classes and conditions of people, the most 
satisfactory evidence that that boy-teacher was a man, 
honest, sincere, energetic, inspiring." 

So have I found, as I have gone over this land of ours, 
traces here and there which show where a man has lived. 
In greater or less degree, as we come to know the inner 
history of some little town, we may find that from some 
past life its sons and daughters have drawn their inspira- 
tion; we may find that once within its borders there lived 
a man. 

One word more: You will go to college, for better or 
for worse. Where shall you go ? The answer to this 
is simple. Get the best you can. You have but one 
chance for a college education, and you cannot afibrd to 
waste that chance on a third-rate or fourth-rate school. 
There is but one thing that can make a college strong and 
useful, and that is a strong and earnest faculty. All 
other matters without this are of less than no importance. 

Buildings, departments, museums, courses, libraries, 
catalogues, names, numbers, rules, and regulations do 
not make a university. It is the men who teach. Go 
where the masters are, in whatever department you 
wish to study. 



GO TO THE MEN WHO KNOW. 23 

Look over this matter carefully; for it is important. 
Go for your education to that school, in whatever State 
or country, under whatever name or control, that will 
serve your purposes best ; that will give you the best 
returns for the money you are able to spend. Do not 
stop with the middle-men. Go to the men who know ; 
the men who can lead you beyond the primary details to 
the thoughts and researches which are the work of the 
scholar. 

Far more important than the question of what you 
shall study is the question of who shall be your teachers. 
The teacher should not be a self-registering phonograph 
to put black marks after the names of the lazy boys. He 
should be a source of inspiration, leading the student in 
his department to the farthest limit of what is already 
known, inciting him to make excursions in the greater 
realms of the unknown. A great teacher never fails to 
leave a great mark on every youth with whom he comes 
in contact. 

Let the school do for you what it can ; and when you 
have entered upon the serious duties of life, let your 
own work and your own influence in the community be 
ever the strongest plea that can be urged in behalf of 
higher education. 



II. 

THE EVOLUTION OF THE COLLEGE CUR- 
RICULUM.* 

A RECENT writer on the German system of educa- 
tion, turning aside from his subject for a moment's 
contemplation of the American system, says that the 
most striking characteristic of the latter is, simply, its 
want of system. Instead of being part of a definite 
whole, well ordered or ill ordered, as the case may be, 
each feature of the American system has been developed 
with little regard to its relation to others. 

Our colleges are English in birth and in tradition; our 
universities caught their inspiration from Germany; while 
our high schools and professional schools are native to 
the soil — the former an outgrowth of the public-school 
system, the latter of commercial enterprise. This confu- 
sion in development has been made more striking by our 
misapplication of names, an example of which is seen 
in our indiscriminate use of the terms ' * college ' * and 
"university." In many a so-called '' college" in Amer- 
ica the chief work done is the teaching of the elements 
of grammar and arithmetic. The "university idea" 
is often regarded as fully met by the addition to such, a 
college of a normal school, a professor or two in law or 
theology, and a self-supporting ' ' college of music. ' ' 

* President's Address, College Association of Indiana, 1887; reprinted from 
" Science Sketches,' ' (first edition; A. C. McClurg & Co., Chicago, 1888) . 

24 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE, 25 

Yet, in spite of all eccentricities in name or form, we 
can recognize the existence of a certain definite type of 
school, which we may call the "American college." 
There are many variations in this type of school — vari- 
ations due to geographical position, to the excess or 
deficiency in denominational zeal, or to the exigencies of 
the struggle for existence. For the fiercest conflicts 
of the average American college have not been with the 
black giant Ignorance, but with the traditional wolf at 
the door. In other words, this new country has not 
been liberal in its support of highier education; and, 
moreover, the funds available for this purpose have been 
used for planting, rather than for watering — to found a 
multitude of weak schools, rather than to make a few 
schools strong. There have been several reasons why 
this is so, and there are some few reasons why it has 
been well that it is so; but these questions I do not care 
to discuss now. The law of the survival of the fittest 
can be depended on to rectify sooner or later all mistakes 
of this kind. Suffice it to say, that we recognize the 
existence of the American college, and that this college 
possesses a more or less definite college curriculum. Of 
the changes in this curriculum I wish now to speak. 

I shall not try to follow out in detail its history prior 
to the time when its germs were brought to us from 
England in the landing of the Pilgrims. We can go back 
in England to the time when the philosophy of Aristotle 
constituted the college course. Then the entire cur- 
riculum was taught by a single teacher, the man of 
universal knowledge. This teacher, for the most part, 
gave his instruction by dictation. The students noted 
down the contents of old books, which the master him- 



26 EVOLUTION OF THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM. 

self had copied before; the place of the teacher was 
simply that of a medium of communication between the 
ancient manuscripts and their later duplicates. 

With the revival of learning came the advent of the 
study of Latin as a language having a literature, and, 
later, the study of Greek, both Latin and Greek, as lit- 
erary studies, being considered extremely dangerous as 
well as heretical at the time of their introduction into the 
curriculum. Both were then resisted by the full force 
of the conservative party of the day. After the revival 
of learning, came about with time the English college 
curriculum, with its tripos, or three pedestals, of Greek, 
Latin, and mathematics. Of this the American curricu- 
lum has been a lineal descendant. 

The American college curriculum at the time when 
most of us became acquainted with it was a very definite 
thing, time-honored, and commanding a certain respect 
from its correspondence with the theory on which it was 
based. Its fundamental idea was discipline of the mind. 
Its mode of effecting this was, in large part, by shutting 
the student's eyes to the distracting and inconsequential 
present, and fixing his gaze on that which was great and 
good and hard to understand in the past. The main 
work of the course consisted of drill in grammar and 
mathematics, and the results of this training were bound 
together by a final exposition at the hands of the presi- 
dent of such of the speculations of philosophers as 
seemed to him safe and substantial. This work lasted — 
for reasons so old as to be long since forgotten — just 
four years, and it was preceded by a certain very defi- 
nite amount of drill, of much the same kind, which was 
reg^arded as a necessary preliminary to the later work. 



THE CLASSICAL COURSE. 27 

Whatever may be our opinion as to the desirability of 
such a course for ourselves, or for our sons or daughters, 
it is impossible not to regard the old-time classical course 
with a feeling of respect. It was based on a theory of 
education, and its promoters were loyal to this theory. 
If only the boys for whom its pigeon-holes were arranged 
could have been of uniform size and quality, the system 
would have been perfect. That it was not quite perfect 
was clearly the fault of human nature, which furnished a 
very variable article of boy for the educators to work 
upon, and caused them to reach by uniform processes 
widely different results. What these variations were is 
well known to us, and needs no explanation. We know 
that there are some boys whose natural food is the 
Greek root. There are others whose dreams expand in 
conic sections, and whose longings for the finite or the 
infinite always follow certain paraboloid or ellipsoid 
curves. There are some to whom the turgid sentences 
of Cicero are the poetry of utterance; and there are 
others who, with none of these tastes, grow and blossom 
in the sunlight of comradery, undisturbed by the harass- 
ing influences of books and bookish men. To all these 
kinds of students this old-time classical course brought 
satisfaction, and the days they spent in Princeton, or 
Harvard, or Amherst were the brightest of their lives. 
Such have rarely failed to try to provide for their chil- 
dren the same training which they found so satisfying 
to themselves. 

But there were other students, not less fond of study, 
who were restless under these conditions. There were 
some to whom the structure of the oriole's nest was more 
marvelous, as well as more poetical, than the structure 



28 E VOL UTION OF THE COLLEGE CURRICUL UM. 

of an ode of Horace. There were others who found In 
modern history, or literature, or philosophy an inspira- 
tion which they did not draw from that which is old. By 
the side of this inspiration, the grammatical drill of the 
schools seemed a lifeless thing. And so it has happened 
that many whom we now regard as great in our literature 
or our science were held in low esteem in the colleges in 
which they graduated — if indeed they ever graduated 
at all. For the scale of marks connected with the col- 
lege curriculum took little account of the soul of man, 
but only of the docility and regularity — virtues of them- 
selves of no mean order — with which the college disci- 
pline was taken. And as these qualities are not alone 
the qualities which win success, either real or spurious, 
in after life, it came to be believed that college honors 
meant future failure — that the college valedictorian was 
the man who was never to be heard of again; and in this 
popular error, easily disproved by statistics, there was 
just enough of truth to keep it from being forgotten. 

No doubt the ancient classical course was a powerful 
agency for culture to many — to most students, perhaps, 
who came within its influence. But it was not so to all. 
Culture is an elusive thing, and the machinery which will 
secure it for you may have no such effect on me. So, 
among the students of the old regime, some never found 
culture, and some found it only in a surreptitious study 
of the world outside. Complaints were not wanting that 
in this curriculum of Latin, Greek, mathematics, and a 
varnish of philosophy, not all the studies pursued were 
useful studies. Much of this complaint was unjust; for 
higher education is not learning a trade, nor is its pur- 
pose to enable its possessor to get a living. But some 



CULTURE AND MASTERY. 29 

of this complaint has been just. No part of a man's 
education is of much value to him, unless it is in some 
way concerned with his future growth. Thousands of 
students never look at a Latin book after leaving col- 
lege. This matters nothing, if the skill they have 
acquired in reading Latin gives them greater mastery 
over their future study or a deeper insight into the prob- 
lems of life. This matters much, if this knowledge has 
in no wise given either insight or mastery. For in such 
case a knowledge of Horace and Homer would be as 
useless as the learning by heart of the laws of the Medes 
and the Persians or an enumeration in order of all the 
kings of Shanghai or Yvetot. The tree of knowledge 
is known by its fruits. ** Culture," says Judge O. W. 
Holmes, **in the form of fruitless knowledge, I utterly 
abhor." 

Now, to those who found culture, the college course 
had served its end; to others, it had not. It was good 
or bad, not in itself, but in its results. It is idle for us to 
say: *' It is sufficient for all " ; ' * It is sufficient for none." 
The discussion of these rival theses has not helped much 
in the solution of the educational problem. 

Emerson says: "The ancient languages, with great 
beauty of structure, contain wonderful remains of genius, 
which draw, and always will draw, certain like-minded 
men, Greek men, and Roman men, in all countries, to 
their study ; but by a wonderful drowsiness of usage 
they had exacted the study of all men. Once (say two 
centuries ago) Latin and Greek had a strict relation to 
all the science and culture there was in Europe, and 
mathematics had a momentary importance at some era 
of physical science. These things became stereotyped 



30 E VOL UTION OF THE COLLEGE CURRICUL UM. 

as education, as the manner of men is. But the good 
spirit never cared for the colleges, and though all men 
and boys were now drilled in Latin, Greek, and mathe- 
matics, it had quite left these shells high and dry on the 
beach, and was now creating and feeding other matters 
at other ends of the world. ' ' 

Thus, as the years went on, other sources of culture 
became more and more emphatic in their claims. The 
workers in the various fields of science, each year be- 
coming more numerous and more active, opened out 
great vistas of the works of God, and he who had seen 
nothing of these might well have his claims to culture 
doubted. Philology, history, philosophy other than that 
stamped with the approval of the safe old masters, each 
put in its claims, as also the vast wealth of the literatures 
of modern Europe. A citizen of the republic must know 
something of the laws which govern national prosperity, 
and a teacher of the people should know something of 
the theory according to which people are taught. When 
these subjects are left out of the college curriculum, the 
clamor for their admittance becomes unbearably loud. If 
all are admitted, the same curriculum becomes like an 
American horse-car, with standing room only, and no 
space to turn around. 

What shall the colleges do ? Shut out these subjects 
they cannot; for to exclude all modern studies and mod- 
ern ideas, to step out of the current of modern life, is 
practically to exclude all students. Rightly or wrongly, 
the students want these things, and sooner or later the 
American college must give what the students want. The 
supply must meet the demand, or there will be no de- 
mand. It is possible, although by no means sure, that 



THE VALUE OF DEGREES. 31 

we, as professors, know what is good for the student 
better than the student does himself; but unless we can 
convince him of that, we must let him have, to a great 
extent, his own way as to what his studies shall be. We 
can see that he does his work well, and we can help him 
in many ways; but the direction of his efforts must in 
the end rest with him. 

The colleges of America stand in a different position 
in this regard from similar schools in England or Ger- 
many. These last are parts of a definite system. Their 
financial support is such that there is no need of paying 
any special attention to popular demands if these demands 
are deemed theoretically undesirable. Moreover, the col- 
lege degree in England, and its equivalent in Germany, 
form a passport of admission to social, educational, or 
political privileges inaccessible to tfie man without this 
degree. Hence, entrance to the college, or gymnasium, 
or the university is, among the higher- educated classes 
in these countries, a matter of course to a much greater 
extent than can be the case in America. The Bachelor' s 
degree in America, or even the Doctor's degree, carries 
no privileges of any sort worth the name. And in the 
long run it is well for America that it does not. Very 
few of our students would work for a degree if it were 
believed that the title were all they got. Thus it comes 
about that in America the average student goes to col- 
lege or is sent to college for the help to be got from 
study, rather than for the sake of graduation. And he 
must be convinced, or his parents must be convinced, 
that this good is a real good, or he will not seek it. Thus 
the difference in the conditions under which our colleges 
work has tended to modify and modernize the curriculum 



32 E VOL UTION OF THE COLLEGE CURRICUL UM. 

more rapidly than has been the case in the corresponding 
schools in Europe. 

Many devices have been adopted for dealing with the 
modern studies. Some have admitted them as extras, 
or, in the expressive language of a New York college 
president, as ''side fixings," reserving the old-time 
tripos as the solid part of the scholastic meal. But 
no matter how little a hold these modern studies had, 
their presence has weakened the force of the old-time 
discipline. It is a law of physics that two bodies can- 
not occupy the same space, even though one of them 
be badly squeezed. And these subjects will submit to 
squeezing no better than the others. So part of the old 
course must be crowded out and part of the new must be 
admitted on terms of more or less perfect equality with 
the former, or else some degree of selection must be per- 
mitted, that students may choose between new and new 
or between new and old. 

Another conceivable arrangement would be to omit 
none of the old work, but to lengthen the course, with 
each study added to the curriculum until each could 
receive a proper share of the student's attention. But 
this cannot well be done. Four years is the fixed length 
of the American college course; and this being an arbi- 
trary thing, with no sort of reason for it, there can be no 
successful argument against it. Besides, we live in hur- 
rying times; and to our students time is money, and the 
only money some of the best of them have. To the 
majority of those reached by our colleges, even the tra- 
ditional four years seems a long time to spend in school 
after reaching manhood. 

For a time, in various ways, it was sought to harmo- 



THE PATCHWORK STAGE. 



33 



nize the new education with the old. But the average 
American college has finally adjusted itself to a second 
phase in the history of the curriculum, which, for con- 
venience, I may call "the patchwork" stage. In this 
arrangement most of the higher mathematics has been 
crowded out, the Greek has been shortened, and the 
Latin also; while other subjects, in greater or less 
amounts, have been more or less grudgingly admitted. 
The amount and kind of these subjects are rarely deter- 
mined by any prearranged plan or in accordance with 
any sort of definite theory of education. As a matter of 
fact, each college has a certain number of professors — 
this determined by the board of trustees, in accordance 
with real or imaginary needs of the college, or with the 
real or imaginary claims of candidates for recognition. 
Then, in the faculty meetings, each one of these profes- 
sors claims what he wants, and receives what he can get, 
in accordance with the law of the survival of the fittest 
and the rule of the majority. Thus the curriculum in 
each college becomes the resultant of many forces in a 
condition of unstable equilibrium. It is altered, not in 
accordance with the educational needs of the students, but 
when one professor gives place in the faculty to another 
more or less energetic or clamorous than he. 

Occasionally in these patchwork courses of study, the 
traces of some master-hand is visible — some method in 
its madness, — which shows that somebody has tried to 
work out an idea. But this is rarely so, I think; and in 
the arrangement of most courses of study nothing higher 
has been thought of than expediency and the exigencies 
of compromise. From the struggle between the repre- 
sentatives of rival subjects in an overloaded course has 

D 



34 E VOL UTION OF THE COLLEGE CURRICUL UM. 

come about, by way of compromise, the establishment 
of different courses of study, in each of which it is as- 
sumed that some scholastic faction will have the ascend- 
ency. In some colleges these various courses have been 
put on an exact equality; but in most cases a more 
or less positive pressure has been brought to bear in 
favor of the classical course, and especially away from 
the sciences. This is well, I think; for in most of our 
colleges the instruction in science is still absurdly inade- 
quate, and wholly valueless for the main end of scientific 
instruction — the training of the judgment through its 
exercise on first-hand knowledge. Wherever science 
is yet in the meshes of bookishness it is best that stu- 
dents should be turned away from it. Wherever its 
limbs are free it will hold its own, whatever the pressure 
from those who do not value it as a factor in education. 
In other words, a competent teacher of science need 
never complain of obstacles in his way ; for the odds are 
all on his side. The same thing is true, I believe, of a 
competent teacher in any other department. A growing 
man incites growth; but even mold will not grow on a 
fossil. Some fifteen years ago I heard a college president 
boast that although his college had two other courses, 
yet three-fourths of his students had been kept in the 
classical course. My question was : ' ' What sort of 
teaching have you in science?" There was nothing 
worth speaking of; only husks which the swine would 
not eat, and the most hungry student could not. 

As I have said, I do not think that the average college 
curriculum, as we have known it in this second stage, is 
the result of any sort of theory of education, of any 
appreciation of the relative value of studies, or of any 



POWER THROUGH CONCENTRATION. 35 

thought as to the best order in which such subjects could 
be arranged. I have myself taken part in the prepara- 
tion of too many such courses to have much respect for 
them. They are simply the results of an attempt to 
put a maximum of topics into a minimum of terms — to 
squeeze ten years of subjects into four years of time. 
The predominance of one group of subjects in a course 
reflects the predominance of some professor in that line 
of work. The idea of discipline, more or less prominent 
in the lower years, is usually forgotten entirely in the 
Junior and Senior years. The idea of the German schools, 
that the source of all power is concentration, — or, as Em- 
erson expresses it, **The one prudence in life is concen- 
tration; the one evil, dissipation," — was wholly aban- 
doned. The theory arose that a college is not a place 
for thorough work of any sort. Its purpose is to give 
a broad and well-rounded culture; to train men to * ' stand 
four-square to every wind that blows," — such a culture 
as comes from a slight knowledge of many things, ac- 
companied by thoroughness in nothing. Indeed, the 
desire of the student to know some one thing well was 
characterized as '* undue specialization," and every effort 
was made to induce the student to turn with equal eager- 
ness from study to study — to physics, logic, Greek, or 
history, — equally interested, equally superficial, in each. 
The study of the text-book was exalted, and a subject 
was said to be completed when its alphabet and a few 
preliminary definitions were more or less perfectly mem- 
orized. Thus it came about that the average student 
regarded all studies with equal indifference. If a mo- 
mentary spark of interest was evoked, it must fade out 
in a few days, as the subject in question gave place to 



36 E VOL UTION OF THE COLLEGE CURRICUL UM. 

some other. The procession moved in haste, and the 
student could not loiter if he kept his place in the line. 

It was said in justification of this course of study, that 
the function of the college is to offer a taste of all sorts 
of knowledge. The student could try all, and select 
that which he liked best as the future work of his life. 
Thoroughness is for men, not boys, and it is a part of 
life-work rather than of school discipline. But every in- 
fluence of the college was away from this end. The value 
of persistent study was never made known to the stu- 
dent. His professors were not specialists. They knew 
nothing from first-hand, and they undervalued in all 
ways the power which comes from knowing what one 
knows. So they taught only definitions, and classifica- 
tions, and names, and dates, and scrap-work generally. 
There was little temptation to study; for the business of 
the professor was repetition, not investigation. It was 
in reference to such work as this that Agassiz said of 
Harvard College, some twenty years ago, that it was no 
university — "only a respectable high school, where they 
taught the dregs of learning." A candidate for a chair 
in an Illinois college demanded of the board of trustees 
that he must be allowed some time for study. He was 
not elected; for the board said that they wanted no man 
who had to study his lessons. They wanted a professor 
who knew already all that he had to teach. But a man 
contented with what he has learned from others can 
never be a great teacher. Only a man who has himself 
come into contact with nature at first-hand can lead 
others in the search for truth. 

The true teacher, Dr. Coulter tells us, should be **an 
authority in the subject of his department, not a local 



THE INSPIRING TEACHER. 37 

authority — any charlatan can be that, — but one among 
his fellows. Such a man, ' ' he continues, ' ' will have power 
enough to be productive. The notion of a teacher as 
one whose whole business is that of a pump, simply to 
be pumped full from some reservoir, that he may fill the 
little pitchers held up under his nose, may be true, but 
it is dreadfully belittling. He should rather be a peren- 
nial spring, where refreshing waters are constantly bub- 
bling forth, a center and source of supply. The man 
who has neither power nor inclination to work in his own 
department, not only demonstrates his unfitness for teach- 
ing, but loses a great source of inspiration to his pupils. 
Imagine the difference between two teachers before a 
class; one carefully crammed with second-hand informa- 
tion which he is there to impart; the other in the flush 
and fire of his own thought and work, stepping aside a 
moment, as an artist, with palette and brushes in hand, 
to explain the beauties of some great picture which he is 
painting. The one is a taskmaster, the other an inspira- 
tion." 

I am well aware that there is a cant of investigation, 
IS of religion and of all other good things. Germany, 
ffor example, is full of young men who set forth to 
[investigate, not because they "are called to explore 
'truth," but because research is the popular fad, and 
inroads into new fields the prerequisite to promotion. 
And so they burrow into every corner in science, phil- 
ology, philosophy, and history, and produce their petty 
results in as automatic a fashion as if they were so many 
excavating machines. Real investigators are born, not 
made, and this uninspired digging into old roots and 
" Urquellen " bears the same relation to the work of the 



38 E VOL UTION OF THE COLLEGE CURRICUL UM. 

real investigators that the Latin verses of Rugby and 
Eton bear to Virgil and Horace. Nevertheless, it is true 
that no second-hand man was ever a great teacher. I 
very much doubt if any really great investigator was ever 
a poor teacher. How could he be so ? The very pres- 
ence of Asa Gray was an inspiration to students of botany 
for years after he had left the classroom. Such a man 
leaves the stamp of his greatness on every student who 
comes within the range of his influence. 

One vice of the patchwork system is its constant im- 
plication that when, after a few weeks, a study is dropped, 
it is thereby completed, — as though any subject could 
be completed in a college course! For the first term or 
the first year spent in the study of any subject whatever, 
cannot give that subject. It gives only the elements of 
it, the dregs of it, the juiceless skeleton, on which future 
work must add the flesh and blood. Culture does not 
consist in the knowledge of any particular subject or set 
of subjects, nor is it the result of any order or method 
by which such studies are taken. Its essential feature is 
in the attitude which its possessor holds toward the world 
and toward the best that has been or can be thought or 
done in it. Its central quality is growth. The student 
gets nutriment from what he digests. *'A cultivated 
woman," says a wise teacher of women, " can afford to 
be ignorant of a great many things, but she must never 
stop growing." Just so with the cultivated man. And 
to the young man or young woman who would grow, 
there is no agency so effective as the influence of a great 
teacher. ' ' Under and around and above all mere 
acquirements," says the writer whom I have just 
quoted, * ' is this subtle infection of character, making 



''LOUIS AG ASSIZ; TEACHERS 39 

the essence of the higher education as different from 
mere erudition as the fresh smell of the tender grape is 
from sheepskin." The school of all schools in America 
which has had the greatest influence on American scien- 
tific teaching was held in an old barn on an uninhabited 
island some eighteen miles from the shore. It lasted 
barely three months, and in effect it had but one teacher. 
The school at Penikese existed in the personal presence 
of Agassiz; and when he died, it vanished. 

The final theory of the patchwork stage of the curric- 
ulum has been, as I have said, that of breadth of culture. 
The student should possess the elements of everything, 
that no part of the world should be a sealed book, that 
no part of his mind should be developed at the ex- 
pense of any other. But the result was, in a general 
way, oftener confusion than culture. The bed-rock of 
the mind was never reached. So far as mental training 
was concerned, almost every result of this curriculum 
was distinctly inferior to that secured by the old classical 
course. In broadening and modernizing the curriculum, 
its sharpness as an implement was lost. The only real 
gain in the change, according to Professor Bain, has been 
* ' the relaxation of the grip of classicism. ' ' Another was, 
perhaps, that many who got nothing from the old course 
could, with the right kind of teachers, get something from 
this. But a criticism I once heard at one of our college 
exhibitions was still pertinent as to most of the work 
done by either professor or student under this regime: 
"What the boys want is to plow a little deeper. There 
is nothing like subsoiling. ' ' 

From the second to the third stage in its history the 
curriculum of the American college is now passing. 



40 EVOLUTION OF THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM, 

This is marked by the advent of the elective system. It 
is impossible to study everything, or even many things, in 
four years. Thoroughness of any sort is incompatible 
with the so-called breadth of culture characteristic of the 
patchwork era. True breadth of culture comes from 
breadth of life, and four years in college cannot give it. 
The elective system, when carried out in its entirety, 
involves the following elements: (i) A substantial and 
thorough course of mental drill, preparatory to the col- 
lege course, — this course being measured by its effect on 
the student's powers of study and of observation, not by 
the amount of grammar, algebra, and rhetoric which has 
been crammed into his head; (2) the placing of all sub- 
jects taught in the college course on an equality, so far 
as the degree is concerned. 

The theory on which this system is based may be 
briefly stated as this: No two students require exactly 
the same line of work in order that their time in college 
may be spent to the best advantage. The college stu- 
dent is the best judge of his own needs, or, at any rate, 
he can arrange his work for himself better than it can be 
done beforehand by any committee or by any consensus 
of educational philosophers. The student may make 
mistakes in this, as he may elsewhere in much more 
important things in life; but here, as elsewhere, he must 
bear the responsibility of these mistakes. The develop- 
ment of this sense of responsibility is one of the most 
effective agencies the college has to promote the moral 
culture of the student. It is better for the student him- 
self that he should sometimes make mistakes than that 
he should throughout his work be arbitrarily directed by 
others. Freedom is as essential to scholarship as to 



FREEDOM IN SCHOLARSHIP, 41 

manhood. Not long since, I met a young German 
scholar, a graduate of a Prussian gymnasium, who has 
enrolled himself as a student of English in an American 
college. To him the free air of the American school was 
its one good thing. It develops a self-reliant manhood 
in the youth at an age at which the student of the gym- 
nasium is yet in leading-strings. In furnishing the best 
of mental training in certain fixed and narrow lines, the 
German student is deprived of that strength which comes 
from self-help and individual responsibility. It is no 
mere accident that the need of severe college discipline 
to guard against the various forms of traditional college 
mischief has steadily declined with the advent of freedom 
of choice in study. 

The elective system, too, enables the student to bring 
himself into contact with the best teachers, — a matter 
vastly more important than that he should select the best 
studies. And this system, therefore, involves a not un- 
healthy competition among the instructors themselves. 
Incompetent, superficial, or fossilized men will be crowded 
out or frozen out, and the law of the survival of the 
fittest will rule in the college faculties as elsewhere in 
nature. 

The elective system has been adopted in greater or less 
degree by most of our leading colleges; while there are 
now very few schools, large or small, which do not make 
some provision for elective studies. That some degree 
of freedom of choice in higher education is desirable, no 
one now questions. The main differences of opinion 
relate to the proportion which these elective studies ought 
to bear to those which are absolutely required, and to the 
age or degree of advancement at which election is safe; for 



42 EVOL miON OF THE COLLEGE CURRICUL UM. 

no one advocates freedom of choice from infancy. There 
is no such thing as a perfect curriculum, and all college 
courses must represent in some degree a compromise 
among varying influences, or else an adaptation to the 
needs of a certain class of students to the exclusion of 
others. All systems are liable to abuse; and as there 
have been many students who made a farce of the classi- 
cal course, or who made it a mere excuse for four years 
spent in boating or billiards, or in social pleasures, so in 
the same way can a farce be made of the freedom allowed 
under the elective system. 

Some of the chief deficiencies of the elective system 
may be summed up under the following heads: — 

I. There are some students who, from pure laziness, 
select only the easiest studies, and go through college 
with the very easiest work which is possible. But this 
is no new thing, and it is not for such students that the 
colleges exist. The college should not obstruct the work 
of its earnest men to keep its idlers and sneaks from 
wasting their useless time. As Dr. Angell has said: '* No 
plan will make the college career of lazy men brilliant. 
. . . The work of the college should be organized to 
meet the needs of the earnest and aspiring students, rather 
than the infirmities and defects of the indolent. ' ' That 
most students, as a matter of fact, do select the easiest 
studies is not true, as statistics certainly show. It is, in 
fact, simple nonsense to call any study easy, if pursued 
in a serious manner for a serious purpose. If any sub- 
ject draws to itself the idlers solely because it is easy, the 
fault lies with the teacher. The success of the elective 
system, as of any system, demands the removal of ineffi- 
cient teachers. The elective system can never wholly 



FAULTS OF THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM. 43 

succeed unless each teacher has the power and the will 
to enforce good work, — to remove from his classes all 
idle or inefficient students. 

2. It is again objected that students having freedom 
of choice are likely to select erratic courses in accordance 
with temporary whims, rather than with any theory of 
educational development. This again is true; but it is 
likewise true that the course apparently the most erratic 
may be the one which brings the student in contact with 
the strongest men. If a Harvard student of a few. years 
ago could have made his college course exclusively of 
botany, embryology, Greek, anatomy, and early English, 
it would seem a singular combination. It would sound 
differently if it were said that his teachers in college were 
chiefly Asa Gray, Goodwin, Holmes, Lowell, and Agassiz. 
It is also true, I think, that the average course as chosen 
by the students themselves is as capable of serious defense 
as the average established course evolved from the pull- 
ing, and hauling, and patching, and fitting of the aver- 
age college faculty. 

3. Another criticism is, that the elective system 
offers temptation to undue or premature specialization. 
This is true, — and premature specialization, like other 
forms of precocious virtue, is much to be deprecated. 
But experience does not lead me to think that the danger 
of * ' undue specialization " is at all a serious one. The 
current, in college and out, is all setting the other way. 
The fact that any man dares to specialize at all, shows 
that he has a certain independence of character; for the 
odds are against it. Specialization implies thorough- 
ness, and I believe that thorough knowledge of some- 
thing is the backbone of culture. Special knowledge of 



44 E VOL UTION OF THE COLLEGE CURRICUL UM. 

any sort gives to each man the base-line by which other 
attainments may be measured; and this unit of measure- 
ment in scholarship can be acquired in no other way. 
There can be, I think, no scholarship worthy of the name 
without some form of special knowledge or special train- 
ing as its central axis. The self-respect of the scholar 
comes from thorough work. The man who feels sure that 
he can know or that he can do something is assured at 
once from the danger of turgid conceit as from that of 
limp humility. He can hold up his head among men 
with a certainty as to his proper place among them. 

I have often heard college graduates complain: " Oh, 
if I had only studied something in particular!" "Oh, if 
I had only learned how to study!" "Oh, if the time 
I have wasted in Latin had been spent in something else! " 
' ' Oh, if the time I have wasted in something else had 
been spent in Latin! " There are few college men of the 
present generation who would not be better scholars 
to-day if half their curriculum had been omitted (not 
much matter what half), and the time had been spent on 
the remaining subjects. But you may say: " Would you 
let a man graduate ignorant of chemistry, of Latin, of 
logic, of botany? " Well, yes, if superficiality in every- 
thing is the alternative. It is well for a scholar to know 
something of each of these and of each of the subjects 
in the most extended curriculum. But he purchases this 
knowledge too dearly if he buys it at the expense of 
thoroughness in some line of study in which a real inter- 
est has been awakened. 

Then, again, with certain men in college the alterna- 
tive is either a close specialization or no college life at all. 
Sometimes a man may wish in college to devote his entire 



MEN OF ONE PURPOSE. 45 

time to a single subject — as physics or history, — making 
himself an authority on that subject, but without any 
effort for broad culture at all. This is not often a wise 
course; but, wise or not, no one will deny that a college 
career spent in this way is better than none at all, and 
in after years such men are rarely a source of shame to 
their Alma Mater. There is a certain well-known natu- 
ralist whom I could name, who some fifteen years ago was 
excluded from the university of his State — not because 
he was idle, or vicious, or weak, but because he wanted 
to spend most of his time in the study of natural history. 
The college had then no place for such a man as that. 
It had no use for bird-knowledge, though it came out 
strong on irregular verbs. But the same college is proud 
of him now, and twelve years later granted the degree 
it had refused. Who is to say that it was better for him 
to leave college than that he should be allowed to follow 
his own bent? No knowledge comes amiss to an inves- 
tigator; but no investigator can afford to sacrifice his 
speciality for the sake of breadth of culture. Thorough- 
ness is the main point, after all, and should take prece- 
dence over versatility. I do not mean to be understood 
as advocating narrowness of sympathy or narrowness of 
culture of any sort. The broadest education is none too 
broad for him who aspires to lead in any part of the 
world of thought. But the forces of the mind, to con- 
tinue the figure, should not be scattered in guerrilla 
bands, but marshaled toward leadership. 

An advantage of the elective system, which has been 
too often overlooked, is its reflex influence on the teacher. 
If a good teacher is the essential element in a good school, 
then anything which helps to make his work better, 



46 E VOL UTION OF THE COLLEGE CURRICUL UM, 

more thorough, or more inspiring, is of the greatest value 
to the student. The great teachers of the world, for the 
most part, have not been, and could not be, drill-masters. 
The man who works with realities cannot become a mar- 
tinet. In the elective system, the teacher deals with 
students who have chosen his courses for the love of the 
work or for love of him. Contact with these classes is a 
constant stimulus and a constant inspiration. No teacher 
can ever do his best on required work or prescribed 
courses, and the best that is in his teacher it is the stu- 
dent's right to receive. 

There is still much to be said in favor of the college 
in which discipline pure and simple is made the chief aim 
of all the work. In such a school those subjects — lan- 
guages, sciences, and philosophy — which serve the ends 
of training best should be taught, and such subjects only. 
Whether anything more suitable for this purpose than 
the ancient classics and mathematics has yet been found, 
I shall not try to say; but the aims of such a course 
should be the same in kind as that of the classical curricu- 
lum. It may perhaps be possible to teach better things 
and in a better way than was done in the classical schools; 
but all attempts at combining in a prescribed curriculum 
mental discipline and a wide range of subjects must re- 
sult in failure, so far as training the mind is concerned; 
you cannot teach everything to every student — either 
the student or the college must choose. 

4. Still another criticism of the elective system is just 
the reverse of this. The elective system permits undue 
scattering. It allows the student to flit from one subject 
to another, thus acquiring versatility without real train- 
insr. This seems to me a more serious fault than any of 



THE BACHELOR'S DEGREE. 47 

the others. It can be remedied in part by a system of 
major and minor studies, or a division of the work into 
specialities which must be pursued for a considerable 
length of time, and electives which may be dropped 
after a simple mastery of their elements. Some such 
arrangement as this seems to me a desirable check upon 
the elective plan, as it tends to insure persistence in some- 
thing, while retaining most of the flexibility of the latter 
system. 

Some of the weakest features of our college system 
center, it seems to me, about the conventional term 
of four years, and the conventional Bachelor's degree. 
Students are encouraged to work for the degree, rather 
than for culture; all work of the student is estimated by 
the bulk, rather than by the quality. In an ideal condition 
of things, the student's work ought not to be estimated 
at all. Marks and terms are clumsy devices, more suit- 
able for measuring cordwood than culture. The degree 
is the official seal of completion set on something which 
in the nature of things can never be completed. For the 
college is not a machine for filling the student with wis- 
dom and learning. It is, at best, a place for self-culture. 
All culture is self- culture, or it is no culture at all. Libra- 
ries, apparatus, museums, teachers even, are useless to 
the student, unless the student use them. Teachers give 
inspiration and criticism; fellow-students do the same: 
but the road to wisdom is a solitary road, to be trav- 
ersed in Indian file. 

We may lay on the Bachelor's degree at once too much 
stress or too little : too much, for the degree is treated 
as if it were an end in itself; too little, for every college 
in our land gives this degree to men whose sole claim to 



48 E VOL UTION OF THE COLLEGE CURRICUL UM, 

higher education consists in a four years' residence in a 
college town — a four years' ' ' exposure to scholastic influ- 
ences. ' ' They make their count of marks on the college 
books, and if, by hook or crook, they can keep * ' regu- 
lar," the march of time will carry them through. Then, 
again, the competition for numbers among our would-be 
* ' populous schools ' ' often leads to discrepancies between 
the actual requirements and those laid down in the pub- 
lished catalogues. Thus low standards are adopted for 
mere numbers' sake. And besides the reputable institu- 
tions, all sorts of mushroom establishments, in private 
hands, have in the Middle West been authorized by law 
to grant the Bachelor's degree with practically no scho- 
lastic requirements at all. 

When the colleges in the patchwork era attempted to 
teach in four years a little of everything, it was found 
that by the same process a little of everything could 
likewise be given in two years, or even in one year, by 
carrying the process of condensation a little farther. I 
received a letter not long ago from the president of an 
alleged college in Kansas — a school which gives the 
Bachelor's degree on a course a year or two long, begun 
at any time, and with no special preparation. He said that 
he had exactly one year of daily recitations to devote to all 
the sciences, each completed in turn. He was especially 
anxious to make no mistake in the logical order of 
arrangement of these sciences — whether it should be 
chemistry, physics, geology, physiology, zoology, and 
botany, or whether the order would be better if reversed. 
Of course, the only answer I could make was, that the 
order was of little importance, and that if a year was all 
the time he had for all of them, it would be better to omit 



''THE INDEPENDENT NORMAL college:' 49 

any five, or at least any four, and to spend his time on 
the rest. But to drop any science would be to drop the 
pretense of offering a liberal education. I have no doubt 
that he found room at last to work all of them in, and a 
term of astronomy and one of political economy besides ! 

I quote from the catalogue of an alleged *' college" in 
Indiana a statement in regard to its ' ' scientific course ' ' 
of one year's duration, which leads to a degree called 
* * Bachelor of Science " : * ' The graduates [of this course] 
are polished speakers as well as accurate mathematicians, 
thorough scientists, and accomplished Latin scholars. 
Graduates from this department fill good positions, and 
are everywhere known as leaders, because of their 
energy, perseverance, enthusiasm, and never-ceasing 
activity," — and so on. The so-called "insurmountable 
barrier " to a degree ' ' formed by the long courses of the 
colleges and State normal schools " is at once blown away, 
and all obstacles which debar indolence and ignorance 
from the privileges of scholarship once for all removed. 

I have a friend in the city of Indianapolis, a most estima- 
ble gentleman, in the real-estate and rental business, who 
some forty years ago received from the Legislature of the 
State of Indiana a charter which constituted him a ' ' uni- 
versity," entitled to hold two hundred thousand dollars 
in property free from all taxes, * * to confer all academic 
degrees, and to enjoy all the rights and privileges of the 
most favored institution." This gentleman has been mer- 
ciful to his fellow- citizens. He has gone about his busi- 
ness, and has conferred no degrees, not even on himself 
But he has the legal right to do it; and this incident 
shows with what laxness the laws of our States view the 
granting of collegiate degrees. Such is the degradation 



50 E VOL UTION OF THE COLLEGE CURRICUL UM, 

of the Bachelor's degree, which has already brought the 
name of American graduate into contempt! 

Still, at the best, the Bachelor's degree is an empty 
name. It is not in America, as in Europe, a key to any 
sort of personal advancement. And it is better that it 
should be so. It is better for each man to stand on his 
own merits as shown by his own life, not as attested by 
any college faculty. * * The student may flourish his col- 
lege diploma, ' ' says Dr. J. P. Lesley, * * but the world 
cares little for that baby badge. ' ' In certain educational 
circles, perhaps, a college degree is a help, or, rather, it 
may represent a certain minimum of culture which is ex- 
pected of all its members. We suppose that a college 
professor must hold a college degree. But this is not 
always the case. I can count on my fingers, taking every 
one, a list of some of the ablest of American college 
teachers to-day, who have never been graduated from 
any college. Most of these hold honorary degrees, it is 
true; but such degrees are empty tributes of the college 
to success of one sort or another, won without the col- 
lege's help. 

It is true, no doubt, that the hope of a degree coaxes 
some men to stay in college longer than they otherwise 
would. This seems a good thing — but is it ? Higher 
education is not working for a degree. It may be incom- 
patible with it. It is putting a cheap price on culture to 
induce the student to take it, not because he wants it, 
but because he wants something else. If a student's 
work is purely perfunctory, the sooner he leaves it for 
something real the better. If the degree is merely a bait 
to lure him on, it is unworthy alike of the college and of 
the student. 



GIVING UP OF COLLEGE DEGREES. 51 

Shall we, then, abandon the Bachelor's degree, and 
give to each student merely the certificates of the profes- 
sors under whom he has studied ? Some day, perhaps, 
but certainly not yet. The French writer, Joubert, has 
said: "All truth it is not well to tell; but all truths it will 
be well to tell when we can all tell them together. ' ' There 
is wisdom in this saying. Degrees are childish things, 
and it would be well to lay them aside; but this we can- 
not do till we can all do it together. Some ten years 
ago, Chancellor Gregory, of the State University of 
Illinois, held the opinion that the college degrees were 
undesirable adjuncts of college training. It was decided 
that by the University of Illinois no degrees should be 
granted. But this decision worked adversely to the 
interests of the college. Many students came there to 
study, who went elsewhere to complete their work. The 
degree might be useless, but the students wanted it. 
Their lack of a degree was a hindrance in securing posi- 
tions; and they went to other colleges where degrees 
were still given. The times were not ready for this 
change, and the giving of degrees has been resumed — 
wisely, I think, — by the institution in question. 

The same end is being reached in another way by the 
University of Virginia and some other colleges of the 
South. In these schools the Bachelor's degree receives 
little or no attention, being practically merged in the 
higher requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. 
By merging both these in the still higher degree of Doc- 
tor of Philosophy, we have a condition similar to that in 
the German universities, where only the Doctor's degree 
is now given. Toward this condition our universities 
are tending; and, through the change of the college into 



52 E VOL UTION OF THE COLLEGE CURRICUL UM, 

the university, the Bachelor degree may in time disap- 
pear. But this reform — if reform it be — can be the 
work of no one man or one school. It must come as a 
natural result of the development of the college. 

So much for the phases, past and present, of the col- 
lege curriculum in America. What of the future ? Will 
there be a fourth, a fifth, a sixth stage in its develop- 
ment; or is the system now full grown, and the elective 
plan, as we know it, its full fruition ? 

We can be sure that the world is still moving. Noth- 
ing is stable, nothing is perpetual, nothing is sufficient. 
With the new needs and the new men of the future will 
come new departments, new methods, and new ideas. 
The curriculum, in its original sense of a little race-course, 
with thirty-six hurdles to be leaped in thirty-six months, 
with a crown of laurel berries at the end, will very soon 
be no more. Special courses of study in as many special 
departments are already taking its place. The traditional 
four years of college training will disappear, and with it 
the sharp lines which have so long set apart the Fresh- 
men, Sophomores, Juniors, and Seniors. Later on, but 
not far in the next century, the Bachelor's degree will 
cease to be regarded; its kindred, the Master's degree, 
is dying already, and the degree of Doctor, the worthiest 
of all, has no elements of immortality. All these things 
are forms, and forms only, not substance; and the sub- 
stance of our higher education is fast outgrowing them. 
College marks, college honors, college courses, college 
degrees, all these things belong, with the college cap and 
gown and the wreath of laurel berries, to the babyhood 
of culture. They are part of our inheritance from the 
past, — from the time when scholarship was not manhood, 



''LEHRFREIHEIT'' AND '' LERNFREIHEITr 53 

when the life of the student had no relation to the life of 
the world. 

The American college of the future will be a place for 
self- culture. The chief need of a college organization is 
to bring great teachers together, that their combined 
influence may effect results which cannot be reached in 
isolation. In other words, the use of a college is to 
produce a college atmosphere, — such an atmosphere as 
forms itself around all great teachers everywhere. The 
various so-called colleges and universities in America will 
gradually differentiate into universities and preparatory 
schools, and the line of direction will ultimately depend 
on the available resources rather than on the ambition of 
the school. To do university work requires better-trained 
professors, and many more of them, than to teach the 
elements of Latin, Greek, and mathematics. This means 
more salaries and larger salaries than are now paid. 
Schools ill endowed or not endowed at all cannot attempt 
this. Those who can do it will do it. The ideas of 
* ' Lehrfreiheit ' ' and ' ' Lerjifreiheit, ' ' — freedom of teach- 
ing and freedom of study, — on which the German 
university is based, will become a central feature of the 
American college system. 

The college as a separate factor in our educational sys- 
tem must in time disappear, by its mergence into the pre- 
paratory school, on the one hand, and into the university, 
on the other. In our Western States, the high school 
and the State university already complete the educational 
series. The college, as such, is already out of the cur- 
rent of the educational stream. The most striking feature 
of recent educational history has been the growth of the 
State universities, the consummate flower of the public- 



54 E VOL UTION OF THE COLLEGE CURRICUL UM. 

school system. It needs no prophet to see that the ulti- 
mate growth of each and every one of these into real 
universities, worthy of our country and worthy of the 
coming twentieth century, is inevitable. 

With time, we shall reach in America a condition of 
things not unlike that seen in Germany, where nothing 
intervenes between the public high school or gymnasium, 
in which all work is prescribed, and the university itself, 
in which all work is free. The position of the prepara- 
tory school in this connection is by no means one to be 
despised. A strong high school is far more valuable to 
the community than a weak college. The work of the 
secondary schools is the foundation of everything higher. 
It should be broadened and deepened so as to include all 
subjects which experience shows to belong to the acces- 
sory groundwork of higher education. I need not go 
over a list of these subjects. The future will make its 
own list, and the efforts of the colleges will not change 
it. But we may be sure that the ultimate demand of the 
colleges will be for students who are trained to see and 
to think, not for students who can merely remember. 
The best studies for college preparation should be the 
best studies for those who do not go to college. They 
are studies which give power and skill, not those which 
merely give information. 

But here, it seems to me, is one of the chief difficulties 
in the way of our colleges. East and West. No school, 
it seems, is content to be a preparatory school; no school 
is content to train for future work elsewhere. Each one 
aims to give a general education; to be a university in a 
small way, a " university for the poor," — a poor uni- 
versity. In the words of Lowell : *' The public schools 



THE HIGH SCHOOL. 55 

teach too little or too much : too little, if education is to 
go no farther; too many things, if what is taught is to 
be taught thoroughly. And the more they seem to teach, 
the less likely is education to go farther; for it is one 
of the weaknesses of democracy to be satisfied with the 
second best if it appear to answer the purpose tolerably 
well, and to be cheaper, as it never is in the long run. ' ' 
In other words, the high schools, too, are in the patch- 
work era, and popular feeling tends to keep them there, 
to satisfy by a show of education the vast majority of 
their students who are likely to go no farther. The 
growth in educational systems is from above downwards, 
and the right kind of preparatory schools will arise only 
in response to the demands of real universities. In his- 
torical sequence, Oxford must precede Rugby, and the 
German university must come before the gymnasium. 
The American high school will not reach, I think, the 
standard of the German gymnasium, which gives train- 
ing not inferior in amount or kind to that of our best 
classical colleges ; for in the American system the univer- 
sity methods of work will begin lower down than in Ger- 
many. This is associated with our qualities as a people, 
as compared with those of the Germans. The American 
youth of twenty-one is more mdependent, more self- 
reliant, and, so far as his relation to the world is con- 
cerned, more mature than the average German student is 
at twenty-five. America is, of all lands, the land of prot- 
estantism; and in education, as in other things, every 
American is a law unto himself. This fact has its bad 
side as well as its good side, but is a fact nevertheless; 
and as educators of Americans, we must take it into 
account. 



56 EVOLUTION OF THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM, 

The old forms in education are passing away; the old 
barriers are being taken down; the old restraints are being 
removed or relegated to the days of boyhood and girl- 
hood. All this we can see, for it takes place before our 
eyes; it is taking place under our hands, and this whether 
we wish it or not. The college boy is becoming a man, 
and the college woman now stands beside him. Not all 
are ready for freedom, perhaps, who have freedom thrust 
upon them. There are not a few students to whom an 
enforced discipline is the only road to scholarship. But, 
with all imaginable drawbacks, our college work in Amer- 
ica yields each year better results than it has ever yielded 
before. We may be sure that in the future, even more 
than in the past, the American college, the American 
university, will stand in the front rank of civilizing influ- 
ences. 



III. 

THE NATION'S NEED OF MEN.* 

IF the experiment of government by the people is to 
be successful, it is you and such as you who must 
make it so. The future of the republic must lie in the 
hands of the men and women of culture and intelligence, 
of self-control and of self- resource, capable of taking care 
of themselves and of helping others. If it falls not into 
such hands, the republic will have no future. Wisdom 
and strength must go to the making of a nation. There 
is no virtue in democracy as such, nothing in American- 
ism as such, that will save us, if we are a nation of weak- 
lings and fools, with an aristocracy of knaves as our 
masters. 

There are some who think that this is the condition 
of America to-day. There are some who think that this 
republic, which has weathered so nobly the storms of 
war and of peace, will go down on the shoals of hard 
times; that we, as a nation, cannot live through the 
nervous exhaustion induced by the financial sprees of our- 
selves and others. We are told that our civilization and 
our government are fit only for the days of cotton and 
corn prosperity. We are told that our whole industrial 
system, and the civilization of which it forms a part, must 
be torn up by the roots and cast away. We are told that 

•Address to the class of 1894, Leland Stanford Junior University; pub- 
lished in the Popular Science Monthlj^, December, 1894. 

57 



58 THE NATION'S NEED OF MEN 

the days of self-control and self-sufficiency are over, and 
that the people of this nation are really typified by the law- 
less bands rushing blindly hither and thither, clamoring 
for laws by which those men may be made rich whom all 
previous laws of God and man have ordained to be poor. 

In these times it is well for us to remember that we 
come of hardy stock. The Anglo-Saxon race, with its 
strength and virtues, was born of hard times. It is not 
easily kept down; the victims of oppression must be of 
some other stock. We who live in America, and who 
constitute the heart of this republic, are the sons and 
daughters of * ' him that overcometh. ' ' Ours is a lineage 
untainted by luxury, uncoddled by charity, uncorroded 
by vice, uncrushed by oppression. If it were not so, we 
could not be here to-day. 

When this nation was born, the days of the govern- 
ment of royalty and aristocracy were fast drawing to a 
close. Hereditary idleness had steadily done its work, 
and the scepter was already falling from nerveless hands. 
God said: *' I am tired of kings; I suffer them no more." 
And when the kings had slipped from their tottering 
thrones, as there was no one else to rule, the scepter fell 
into the hands of the common man. It fell into our 
hands, ours of this passing generation, and from us it 
will pass on into yours. You are here to make ready for 
your coronation, to learn those maxims of government, 
those laws of human nature, without which all adminis- 
trations must fail; ignorance of which is always punish- 
able by death. If you are to hold this scepter, you must 
be wiser and stronger than the kings; else you, too, shall 
lose the scepter as they have lost it, and your dynasty 
shall pass away. 



WEAKNESS DEMANDS TYRANNY, 59 

For more than a century now the common man has 
ruled America. How has he used his power? What 
does history tell us of what the common man has done ? 
It is too soon to answer these questions. A hundred 
years is a time too short for the test of such gigantic 
experiments. Here in America we have made history 
already — some of it glorious, some of it ignoble; much 
of it made up of the old stories told over again. We have 
learned some things that we did not expect to learn. We 
find that the social problems of Europe are not kept away 
from us by the quarantine of democracy. We find that 
the dead which the dead past cannot bury are thrown up 
on our shores. We find that weakness, misery, and 
crime are still with us, and that wherever weakness is 
there is tyranny also. The essence of tyranny, we have 
found, lies not in the strength of the strong, but in the 
weakness of the weak. We find that in the free air of 
America there are still millions who are not free — 
millions who can never be free under any government or 
under any laws, so long as they remain what they are. 

The remedy for oppression, then, is to bring in better 
men, men who cannot be oppressed. This is the remedy 
our fathers sought; we shall find no other. The problem 
of life is not to make life easier, but to make men stronger, 
so that no problem shall be beyond their solution. It 
will be a sad day for the republic when life is easy for 
ignorance, indolence, and apathy. It is growing easier 
than it was; it is too easy already. There is no growth 
without its struggle. Nature asks of man that he use his 
manhood. If a man puts no part of his brain and soul 
into his daily work — if he feels no pride in the part he 
is taking in life, — the sooner he leaves the world the 



6o THE NATION'S NEED OF MEN. 

better. His work is the work of a slave, and his life the 
waste of so much good oxygen. The misery he endures 
is nature's testimony to his worthlessness. We cannot 
save him from nature's penalties. Our duty toward him 
may be to temper justice with mercy. This is not the 
matter of importance. Our duty toward his children is 
to see that they do not follow his path. The grown-up 
men and women of to-day are, in a sense, past saving. 
The best work of the republic is to save the children. 
The one great duty of a free nation is education — 
education, wise, thorough, universal; the education, not 
of cramming, but of training; the education which no 
republic has ever given, and without which all republics 
must be in whole or in part failures. If this generation 
should leave as its legacy to the next the real education, 
training in individual power and skill, breadth of out- 
look on the world and on life, the problems of the next 
century would take care of themselves. There can be no 
collective industrial problem where each man is capable 
of solving his own individual problem for himself. 

In this direction lies, I believe, the key to all industrial 
and social problems. Reforms in education are the great- 
est of all reforms. The ideal education must meet two 
demands: it must be personal, fitting a man or woman 
for success in life; it must be broad, giving a man or 
woman such an outlook on the world as that this success 
may be worthy. It should give to each man or woman 
that reserve strength without which no life can be success- 
ful, because no life can be free. With this reserve the 
man can face difficulties, because the victor in any 
struggle is he who has the most staying power. With 
this reserve, he is on the side of law and order, because 



RESERVES IN LIFE. 6i 

only he who has nothing to lose can favor disorder or 
misrule. He should have a reserve of property. Thrift 
is a virtue. No people can long be free v/ho are not 
thrifty. It is true that thrift sometimes passes beyond 
virtue, degenerating into the vice of greed. Because 
there are men who are greedy — drunk with the intoxica- 
tion of wealth and power, — we sometimes are told that 
wealth and power are criminal. There are some that hold 
that thrift is folly and personal ownership a crime. In the 
new Utopia all is to be for all, and no one can claim a 
monopoly, not even of himself There may be worlds 
in which this shall be true. It is not true in the world 
into which you have been born. Nor can it be. In the 
world we know, the free man should have a reserve of 
power, and this power is represented by money. If thrift 
ever ceases to be a virtue, it will be at a time long in the 
future. Before that time comes, our Anglo-Saxon race 
will have passed away and our civilization will be forgot- 
ten. The dream of perfect slavery must find its reali- 
zation in some other world than ours, or with a race of 
men cast in some other mold. 

A man should have a reserve of skill. If he can do 
well something which needs doing, his place in the world 
will always be ready for him. He must have intelligence. 
If he knows enough to be good company for himself 
and others, he is a long way on the road toward happi- 
ness and usefulness. To meet this need our schools have 
been steadily broadening. The business of education is 
no longer to train gentlemen and clergymen, as it was in 
England; to fit men for the professions called learned, 
as it has been in America. It is to give wisdom and 
fitness to the common man. The great reforms in edu- 



62 THE NATION'S NEED OF MEN. 

cation have all lain in the removal of barriers. They 
have opened new lines of growth to the common man. 
This form of university extension is just beginning. The 
next century will see its continuance. It will see a change 
in educational ideals greater even than those of the revi- 
val of learning. Higher education will cease to be the 
badge of a caste, and no line of usefulness in life will be 
beyond its helping influence. 

The man must have a reserve of character and pur- 
pose. He must have a reserve of reputation. Let others 
think well of us; it will help us to think well of ourselves. 
No man is free who has not his own good o])inion. A 
man will wear a clean conscience as he would a clean shirt, 
if he knows his neighbors expect it of him. I le must have 
a reserve of love, and this is won by the service of others. 
' ' He that brings sunshine into the lives of others cannot 
keep it from himself" He must form the ties of family 
and friendship; that, having something at stake in the 
goodness of the workl, he will do something toward mak- 
ing the world really good. 

When an American citizen has reserves like these, he 
has no need to beg for special favors. All he asks of 
legislation is that it keep out of his way. He demands 
no form of sj^ecial guardianship or protection. He can 
pay as he goes. The man who cannot has no right to 
go. Of all forms of greed, the greed for free lunches, — 
the desire to get something for nothing, — is the most de- 
moralizing, and in the long run most dangerous. The 
Hag of freedom can 7ievcr float over a natioii of deadheads. 

Then, again, education must take the form of real 
patriotism — of public interest and of civic virtue. If a 
republic be not wisely managed, it will fail as any other 



SETTLING QUESTIONS RIGHT 63 

corporation would; it will only succeed as it deserves 
success. 

The problems of government are questions of right 
and wrong; they can be settled only in one way. They 
must be settled right. Whatever is settled wrong comes 
up for settlement again, and this when we least expect 
it. It comes up under harder conditions, and compound 
interest is charged on every wrong decision. The slavery 
question, you remember, was settled over and over again 
by each generation of compromisers. When they led 
John Brown to the scaffold, his last words were: ** You 
would better — all you people of the South — prepare 
yourselves for a settlement of this question, that must 
come up for a settlement again sooner than you are pre- 
pared for it. You may dispose of me now very easily," 
he said; "I am nearly disposed of now; but this ques- 
tion is still to be settled — this negro question, I mean; 
the end of that is not yet." 

This, John Brown said, and they settled the problem 
for the time by hanging him. But the question rose 
again. It was never settled until at last it was "blown 
hellward from the cannon's mouth." Then it was found 
that for every drop of negro blood drawn by the lash, a 
thousand drops of Saxon blood had been drawn by the 
sword. 

Thus it is with every national question, large or small. 
Thus it will be with the tariff, with finance, with the civil 
service. Each question must be settled right, and we 
must pay for its settlement. It is said that fifteen per 
cent of the laws on the statute books of the States of the 
Union stand there in defiance of acknowledged laws of 
social and economic science. Every such statute is blood 



64 THE NATION'S NEED OF MEN. 

poison in the body politic. Around every such law will 
gather a festering sore. Every attempt to heal this sore 
will be resisted by the full force of the time-servers. Such 
statutes are steadily increasing in number — concessions 
by short-sighted legislatures to the arrogant monopolist, 
the ignorant demagogue, or the reckless agitator. This 
must stop. ' ' They enslave their children' s children who 
make compromise with sin," or with ignorance, or with 
recklessness. ''The gods," said Marcus Aurelius, ''are 
at the head of the administration, and will have nothing 
but the best." 

" My will fulfilled shall be; 
In daylight or in dark, 
My thunderbolt has eyes to see 
Its way home to the mark! " 

It was the dream of the founders of this republic that 
each year the people should choose from their number 
' ' their wisest men to make the public laws. ' ' This was 
actually done in the early days; for our first leaders were 
natural leaders. The men who founded America were 
her educated men. None other could have done it. But 
this condition could not always last. As the country 
grew, ignorance came and greed developed; ignorance 
and greed must be represented, else ours would not be 
a representative government. So to our congresses our 
people sent, not the wisest, but the men who thought as 
the people did. We have come to choose, in our law- 
makers, not rulers, but representatives; we ask not wis- 
dom, but watchfulness for our personal interests. So we 
send those whose interests are ours; those who act as our 
attorneys. And just as the people do this, so do the 
great corporations, who form a large part of the people 



AGENTS, NOT RULERS. 65 

and control a vastly larger part. And as the corpora- 
tions command the best service, they often send as their 
attorneys abler men than the people can secure. And 
so it has come about that demagogues and special agents 
make up the body of lawmakers in this country, and this 
in both parties alike. They represent, not our wisdom, 
but our business. They are the reflex of the people they 
represent; no better, and certainly no worse. Those 
whose interest lies in the direction of good government 
alone are too often unrepresented. 

In this degree republican government has failed. For 
this failure there is again but one remedy — education. 
If the people are to rule us, the people must be wise. 
We must have in every community men trained in social 
and political science. We must have men with the cour- 
age of their convictions; only education can give real 
convictions. We must have men who know there is a 
right to every question as well as many wrongs. We 
must have men who know what this right is; or, if not 
knowing, who know how the right may be found. Very 
few men ever do that which they know and really believe 
to be wrong. Most wrongdoing comes from a belief 
that there is no right, or that right and wrong are only 
relative. 

Professor Powers has said : ' ' We are no longer guided 
by wise men. We are guided by wise men's wisdom after 
we have reviewed it and decided that it is wisdom. An 
increasing proportion of our people are fairly independ- 
ent in their thought, and vigorous in their assertion of 
their convictions. These men — common human men — 
without their knowledge or consent, come into the world 
charged with the awful responsibility of managing inter- 



66 THE NATION'S NEED OF MEN. 

ests compared with which the tasks of the old gods of 
Olympus were but as children's play." 

If representative government is ever to bring forward 
wisdom and patriotism, it will be because wisdom and 
patriotism exist and demand representation. In this 
direction lies one of the most important duties of the 
American university. Every question of public policy 
is a question of right and wrong. To such questions all 
matters of party ascendency, all matters of individual 
advancement must yield precedence. There is no virtue 
in the voice of majorities. The danger of ignorance 
or indifference is only intensified when rolled up in ma- 
jorities. Truth is strong, and error is weak, and the 
majorities of error melt away under the influence of a 
few men whose right acting is based on right thinking. 
Right thinking has been your privilege; right acting is 
now your duty; and at no time in the history of the 
world has duty been more imperative than now. 



IV. 
THE CARE AND CULTURE OF MEN.* 

a 'T^HE best political economy," Emerson tells us, "is 
1 the care and culture of men." Culture is not 
coddling, but training, — not help from without, but 
growth from within. The harsh experience of centuries 
has shown that men are not made by easy processes. 
Character is a hardy plant. It thrives best where the 
north wind tempers the sunshine. 

The life of civilized man is no simple art, — no auto- 
matic process. To make life easy is to destroy its effect- 
iveness. The civilization to which we are born makes 
heavy demands upon those who take part in it. Its 
rights are all duties; its privileges are all responsibilities. 
Its risks are terrible to those who do not make their 
responsibilities good. And these responsibilities are not 
individual alone. They fall upon all who are bound 
together in social or industrial alliance. If we are to 
bear one another's burdens, we must see that we lay 
upon ourselves no unnecessary burdens by our indiffer- 
ence or our ignorance. There is no safety for the 
republic, no safety for the individual man, for whom the 
republic exists, so long as he or his fellows are untrained 
or not trained aright. 

So there is no virtue in educational systems unless 
these systems meet the needs of the individual. It is 

* Address to the class of 1895, Leland Stanford Junior University. 

67 



68 THE CARE AND CULTURE OF MEN. 

not the ideal man or the average man who is to be 
trained; it is the particular man as the forces of heredity 
have made him. His own qualities determine his needs. 
"A child is better unborn than untaught." A child, 
however educated, is still untaught if by his teaching we 
have not emphasized his individual character, if we have 
not strengthened his will and its guide and guardian, the 
mind. 

The essence of manhood lies in the growth of the 
power of choice. In the varied relations of life the power 
to choose means the duty of choosing right. To choose 
the right, one must have the wit to know it and the will 
to demand it. In the long run, in small things as in 
large, wrong choice leads to death. It is not "punished 
by death," for nature knows nothing of rewards and 
punishments. Death is simply its inevitable result. No 
republic can live — no man can live in a republic in which 
wrong is the repeated choice either of the people or of 
the state. 

All education must be individual — fitted to individual 
needs. That which is not so is unworthy of the name. 
A misfit education is no education at all. Every man 
that lives has a right to some form of higher education. 
For there is no man that would not be made better and 
stronger by continuous training. I do not mean, of 
course, that the conventional college education of to-day 
could be taken by every man to his advantage. Still 
less could the average man use the conventional college 
education of any past era. Higher education has seemed 
to be the need of the few because it has been so narrow. 
It was born in the days of feudal caste. It was made for 
the few. Its type was fixed and pre-arranged, and those 



FITTING TRAINING TO MAN. 69 

whose minds it did not fit were looked upon by the 
colleges as educational outcasts. The rewards of investi- 
gation, the pleasures of high thinking, the charms of 
harmony were not for the multitude. To the multitude 
they must be accessible in the future; but not as gifts — 
nothing worth having was ever a gift, — rather as rights 
to be taken by those who can hold them. 

To furnish the higher education that humanity needs, 
the college must be broad as humanity. No spark of 
talent man may possess should be outside its fostering 
care. To fit man into schemes of education has been the 
mistake of the past. To fit education to man is the 
work of the future. 

The traditions of higher education in America had 
their origin in social conditions very different from ours. 
In the Golden Age of Greece, each free man stood on 
the back of nine slaves. The freedom of the ten was 
the birthright of the one. To train the tenth man was 
the function of the early university. Only free men can 
be trained. A part of this training of the tenth in the 
early days was necessarily in the arts by which the nine 
were kept in subjection. 

The universities of Paris, and Oxford, and Cambridge 
were founded to educate the lord and the priest. And 
to these schools and their successors, as time went on, 
fell the duty of training the gentleman and the clergy- 
man. Only in our day has it been recognized that the 
common man had part or lot in higher education. For 
now he has come into his own, and he demands that he, 
too, may be noble and gentle. His own lord and king 
is the common man already, and in the next century we 
shall see him installed as his own priest. And through 



70 THE CARE AND CULTURE OF MEN. 

higher education he must gain fitness for his work, if he 
gain it at all. And he must gain it; for the future of 
civilization is in his hands. The world cannot afford to 
let him fail. All the ages have looked forward to the 
common man as their ' ' heir apparent. ' ' The whole past 
of humanity is staked on his success. 

The old traditions are not sufficient for him. The 
narrow processes by which gentlemen were trained in 
medieval Oxford are not adequate to the varied de- 
mands of the man of the twentieth century. He is more 
than a gentleman. Heir to all the ages he must be; and 
there are ages since, as there were ages before, the tasks 
set in these schools became stereotyped as culture. The 
need of choice has become a thousand-fold greater with 
the extension of human knowledge and human power. 
The need of choosing right is steadily growing more and 
more imperative. If the common man is to be his own 
lord and his own priest in these strenuous days, his 
strength must be as great, his consecration as intense as 
it was with those who were his rulers in ruder and less 
trying times. The osmosis of classes is still going on. 
By its silent force it has ' ' pulled down the mighty from 
their seats, and has exalted them of low degree. ' ' Again 
educate our rulers. We find that they need it. They 
have, in the aggregate, not yet the brains, nor the con- 
science, nor the force of will that fits them for the task the 
fates have thrown upon them. 

If the civilization of the one is shared by the ten, it 
must increase tenfold in amount. If it does not, the 
Golden Age it seems to represent must pass away. To 
hold the civilization we enjoy to-day is the work of 
higher education. Every moment we feel it slipping 



THE PRICE OF LIBERTY. 71 

from our hands. Hence, every moment we must strive 
for a fresh hold. "Eternal vigilance," it was said of 
old, "is the price of liberty." And this was what was 
meant. The perpetuation of free institutions rests with 
free men. The masses, the mobs of men, are never free. 
Hence the need of the hour is to break up the masses. 
They should be masses no longer, but individual men and 
women. The work of higher education is to put an end 
to the rule of the multitude. To tyranny confusion is 
succeeding, and the remedy for confusion is in the growth 
of men who cannot be confused. 

The university of to-day must recognize the need of the 
individual student as the reason for its existence. If we 
are to make men and women out of boys and girls, it will 
be as individuals, not as classes. The best field of corn 
is that in which the individual stalks are most strong 
and most fruitful. Class legislation has always proved 
pernicious and ineffective, whether in a university or in a 
state. The strongest nation is that in which the individual 
man is most helpful and most independent. The best 
school is that which exists for the individual student. A 
university is not an aggregation of colleges, departments, 
or classes. It is built up of young men and women. 
The student is its unit. The basal idea of higher edu- 
cation is that each student should devote his time and 
strength to what is best for him; that no force of tradi- 
tion, no rule of restraint, no bait of a degree should 
swerve any one from his own best educational path. As 
Melville Best Anderson has said, ' ' The way to educate 
a man is to set him at work; the way to get him to 
work is to interest him ; the way to interest him is to 
vitalize his task by relating it to some form of reality." 



72 THE CARE AND CULTURE OF MEN. 

No man was ever well trained whose own soul was not 
wrought into the process. No student was ever brought 
to any worthy work except by his own consent. 

So the university must not drive, but lead. Nor, in 
the long run, should it even lead; for the training of the 
will is effected by the exercise of self-guidance. The 
problem of human development is to bring men into the 
right path by their own realization that it is good to walk 
therein. The student must feel with every day's work 
that it has some place in the formation of his character. 
His character he must form for himself; but higher edu- 
tion gives him the materials. His character gathers con- 
secration as the work goes on, if he can see for himself 
the place of each element in his training. Its value he 
has tested, and he knows that it is good, and its results 
he learns to treasure accordingly. 

Individualism in education is no discovery of our times. 
It was by no means invented at Palo Alto; neither was 
it born in Harvard nor in Michigan. The need of it is 
written in the heart of man. It has found recognition 
wherever the * ' care and culture ' ' of man has been taken 
seriously. 

A Japanese writer, Uchimura, says this of education in 
old Japan: " We were not taught in classes then. The 
grouping of soul-bearing human beings into classes, as 
sheep upon Australian farms, was not known in our old 
schools. Our teachers believed, I think instinctively, that 
man (persona)is unclassifiable; that he must be dealt with 
personally — /. e. face to face, and soul to soul. So they 
schooled us one by one — each according to his idiosyn- 
crasies, physical, mental, and spiritual. They knew each 
one of us by his name. And as asses were never harnessed 



KNOWING STUDENTS BY NAME. 73 

with horses, there was but little danger of the latter be- 
ing beaten down into stupidity, or the former driven into 
valedictorians' graves. In this respect, therefore, our 
old-time teachers in Japan agreed with Socrates and 
Plato in their theory of education. So naturally the rela- 
tion between teachers and students was the closest one 
possible. We never called our teachers by that unap- 
proachable name. Professor. We called them Sensei, 
men born before, so named because of their prior birth, 
not only in respect of the time of their appearance in 
this world, which was not always the case, but also of 
their coming to the understanding of the truth. It was 
this, our idea of relationship between teacher and student, 
which made some of us to comprehend at once the inti- 
mate relation between the Master and the disciples which 
we found in the Christian Bible. When we found written 
therein that the disciple is not above his master, nor the 
servant above his lord; or that the good shepherd giveth 
his life for his sheep, and other similar sayings, we took 
them almost instinctively as things known to us long 
before." 

Thus it was in old Japan. Thus should It be in new 
America. In such manner do the oldest ideas forever 
renew their youth, when these ideas are based not on 
tradition or convention, but in the nature of man. 

The best care and culture of man is not that which 
restrains his weakness, but that which gives play to his 
strength. We should work for the positive side of life. 
We should build up ideals of effort. To get rid of vice 
and folly is to let strength grow in their place. 

The great danger in democracy is the seeming pre- 
dominance of the weak. The strong and the true seem 



74 THE CARE AND CULTURE OF MEN. 

to be never in the majority. The politician who knows 
the signs of the times understands the ways of majorities. 
He knows fully the weakness of the common man. In- 
justice, violence, fraud, and corruption are all expressions 
of this weakness. These do not spring from competi- 
tion, but from futile efforts to stifle competition. Com- 
petition means fair play. Unfair play is the confession 
of weakness. 

The strength of the common man our leaders do not 
know. Ignorant, venal, and vacillating the common man 
is at his worst; but he is also earnest, intelligent, and 
determined. To know him at his best, is the essence of 
statesmanship. His power for good may be used as well 
as his power for evil. It was this trust of the common 
man that made the statesmanship of Abraham Lincoln. 
And under such a leader the common man ceased to be 
common. To know strength is the secret of power. To 
work with the best in human nature is to have the fates 
on your side. 

' ' A flaw in thought an inch long, ' ' says a Chinese 
poet, "leaves a trace of a thousand miles." If collect- 
ive action is to be safe, the best thought of the best men 
must control it. It is the ideal of statesmanship to bring 
these best thoughts into unison. The flaw in the thought 
of each one will be corrected by the clear vision of others. 
And this order and freedom, clear vision and clean act- 
ing, we have the right to expect from you. Knowledge 
is power, because thought is convertible into action. 
Ignorance is weakness, because without clearness of pur- 
pose action can never be eflective. 

The best political economy is the care and culture of 
men. The best-spent money of the present is that which 



THE POWER OF THE UNIVERSITY. 75 

is used for the future. The force which is used on the 
present is spent or wasted. That which is used on the 
the future is repaid with compound interest. It is for 
you to show that effort for the future, of which you are 
the subjects, is not wasted effort. That you will do so 
we have no shadow of doubt. If its influence on you 
and you only were the whole of the life of the university 
we love, it would be worth all it has cost. The money 
and the effort, the faith and devotion these halls have 
seen would not be wasted. The university will live in 
you. You are her children — first-born, and it may be 
best-beloved, — and in the ever- widening circle of your 
work she shall rejoice. For your influence will be posi- 
tive, and therefore effective. It stands for the love of 
man and the love of truth. No one can love man aright 
who does not love truth better. And in the end these 
loves are alike in essence. 

The foundation of a university, as Professor Howard 
has told us, may be an event greater in the history of 
the world than the foundation of a state. By its life is it 
justified. The state at the best exists for the men and 
women that compose it. Its needs can never be the 
noblest, its aims never the highest, because it can never 
rise above the present. Its limit of action is that which 
now is. The university stands for the future. It deals 
with the possibilities of men, with the strength and virtue 
of men which is not yet realized. Its foundation is 
the co-operation of the strong, its function to convert 
weakness into strength. The universities of Europe have 
shaped the civilization of the world. The universities 
of the world will shape the growth of man so long as 
civilization shall abide. 



V. 

THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY.* 

ALL civilized countries live under a government by- 
popular opinion. In proportion as public opinion 
is wise and enlightened, the government will be en- 
lightened and wise. In other words, the people will 
always have as good a government as their intelligence 
and patriotism deserve, and no better. In the long run 
government can be made better only by the improvement 
of the public opinion on which it rests. This can be 
done only by the spread of knowledge and the develop- 
ment of the moral sense. It is one of the chief duties 
of the University to send out men who, by their personal 
influence, shall help in the making of good citizens. The 
management of a great republic in these days is not a 
simple thing. Our nation has within itself a host of evil 
forces, and these forces will destroy it if their influence 
is not met by still more potent forces working together 
for good. We must know these evil influences, their 
origin, their power, and their results, if we are to do 
eflective work against them. In this need lies the reason 
for your education. 

The nation and the university have the right to expect 
of you, as educated men and women, to stand every- 
where as forces on the side of good government. Not 
that you should be good citizens merely; that you should 

* Address to the Class of 1893, Leland Stanford Jr. University. 

76 



THE HOPE OF THE STATE. 77 

observe the laws, deal justly with your neighbors, pay 
your debts, support your families, and keep out of jail. 
All this we expect of men in general; but as you have 
had opportunities not granted to the majority, the State 
has the right to expect more of you. It asks not only 
that you should break none of its laws, but that you 
should help to make and sustain wise laws; that you 
should stand for good, for right living, right thinking, 
and right acting in the community. It expects you to do 
this, even at a sacrifice of your own personal interests. 
If you should not so stand, your education has been 
a losing bargain. It has simply ' ' sharpened your claws 
and whetted your tusks ' ' that you may the more easily 
prey upon your unenlightened neighbors. 

What then shall the State expect of you more than 
of the others ? Where shall you stand when the count 
is taken in politics, in morals, in religion? If you are 
to help raise the standard of public opinion, you must 
address yourself to the work in earnest. You must not 
stand aloof from the people it is your duty to help. 
Yet, standing with the masses, you should never lose 
yourself in the mass. You must keep your own com- 
pass and know your own road. The mass will move 
to the left when your instincts and principles tell you to 
go to the right. You may find it a hard struggle, and 
may seem to fail at last; but a force once exerted can 
never be lost. 

It is not your duty to join yourself to organizations 
which can take away any part of your freedom. It is 
not your duty to vote the ticket of my party, nor of your 
party, nor that of any one of the time-honored political 
organizations into which men naturally fall. For you 



78 THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY. 

and I know that the questions which divide the great 
parties of a free country are not, as a rule, questions 
of morals or good citizenship. The sheep are never all 
on one side, nor the goats on the other. Party divi- 
sions are based, for the most part, on hereditary tenden- 
cies, on present expediencies, and hopes of temporary 
gain, and too often on the distribution of power and 
plunder, of power to plunder. When your party is led 
by bad men, or when its course is headed in the wrong 
direction, your State expects you as educated men to 
know it. 

Your State expects you to have the courage of your 
convictions. Your State expects you to have the power 
to stand alone — to bolt, if need be, when other modes 
of protest fail. You will not win friends by asserting 
your manhood against partisan pressure. You will not 
pave the way to a vote of thanks or a nomination to Con- 
gress, but you will keep your own self-respect, and some 
day, when the party recovers its senses, you will see 
it come in full run in your direction. 

One duty of the scholar in politics is to serve as an 
antidote to the thick-and-thin partisan — the rock-ribbed 
Bourbon of any party, who learns nothing, and scruples 
at nothing. A good citizen, as has been well said, can- 
not vote an unscratched ticket. The man who does so, 
in whatever party, leaves in the course of years few sorts 
of rascals, public or private, unsupported by his vote. 
The men whom your vote helps to elect are properly 
regarded as your representatives, and the knave, the 
trickster, the gambler, the drunkard, the briber, the 
boss, should not rightfully represent you. If such do 
represent you, it would be better for our country if you 



THE FREE MAN, 79 

were left unrepresented, and the State has made a losing 
bargain in educating you. 

I do not plead for political isolation. That you stand 
aloof from the majority, is no proof that you are right 
and they are wrong. For the most part, we believe, the 
feeling of the majority is not far from right. The great 
heart of the republic beats true. To doubt this would 
be to despair of popular government. But whether right 
or wrong, the majority of the party are not the keepers 
of your conscience. Your conscience is your own. * ' I 
went into this convention," said a brave man once, "a 
free man, with my own head under my own hat, and a 
free man I meant to come out of it." The opinions of the 
majority are molded by the few. That among these few 
who would mold opinion you should stand, is a reason 
for your training in the science of government. In all 
questions of public or private policy, be yourself, no mat- 
ter who your grandfather was, no matter who your neigh- 
bor may be. If you are born and bred in any party, 
think of these things. A hereditary yoke is ignoble; 
shake it off, and then, when once a free man, you may 
resume your place, if you choose. If there must be a 
hereditary partisanship in your family, be you the man 
to start it. Be the first in your dynasty, and encourage 
your son to be the first in his. 

But your State expects more of you than mere inde- 
pendence of hereditary prejudices. Let it never be said 
of you: *' It is for his interest to do so and so; therefore 
we can count on him. He lives in the First Ward; there- 
fore he believes in prohibition. He lives in the vSixth 
Ward; therefore his vote is for free whisky. He will make 
by this thing; therefore he favors that course of action." 



8o THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY. 

It is much easier to be independent of political bosses than 
to be free from the dictation of your own selfish instincts. 
But the good citizen is superior to the prejudices of his 
locality, to the selfish interests of his trade. The good 
man is a citizen of the State, not of the Sixth Ward — not of 
the iron county, nor of the raisin county, nor of the State 
merely, nor of the United States. The good citizen is a 
citizen of the world; itself, as citizenship improves, be- 
coming one vast community, the greatest of all republics. 
For true patriotism is not a matter of waving flags and 
Fourth of July orations. It lies not in denouncing Eng- 
land nor in fighting Chile; not in cock-crowing nor in 
bull-baiting. It consists in first knowing what is true 
about one's own community or country, and then in the 
willingness to sink one's personal interest in the welfare 
of the whole. All patriotism which involves neither 
knowledge nor self-devotion is a worthless counterfeit. 

We have the right to expect the scholar to serve as an 
antidote to the demagogue. You have been trained to 
recognize the fetiches and bugaboos of the past; you 
should know those of the present. Notions as wild, if 
not as wicked, as the witchcraft that haunted Salem two 
hundred years ago still vex our American life. The 
study of history is your defense against these. As ' * the 
running stream, they dare na* cross, ' ' kept off the witches 
of old, so will your studies in this field defend you from 
bugaboos, alive or dead. You hold the magic wand be- 
fore which the demagogue is silent and harmless. It is 
your duty and privilege to use it for the people's good. 

It is true that America is not the best governed of the 
civilized nations. You know that this is so. You know 
that America's foreign policy is weak, vacillating, inefii- 



MISRULE IN AMERICA. 8i 

cient. You know that her internal policy is lavish, 
careless, unjust. You know that we no longer send, as 
in the old days, *'our wisest men to make the public 
laws. ' ' You know that our legislative bodies, from the 
board of aldermen to the United States Senate, are not 
always bodies of which we are proud. You know that 
their members often are not men in whom the people 
have confidence. Our civil service has been one of the 
worst ^'on the planet" ; our foreign service has been the 
laughingstock of Europe. Our courts of justice, on the 
whole the soundest part of our Government, are not 
all that they should be. Too often they are neither 
swift nor sure. Too often the blindfold goddess who 
rules over them is quick to discern the pressure of the 
finger of gold on the "wrong side of the balances." 
Our currency fluctuates for the benefit of the gambler, 
who thrives at the laborer's cost. In all this our own 
California offers no exception. The history of her gov- 
ernment is a short one, but it is long with the records of 
misrule and corruption. Her average of general intelli- 
gence is high. Her average of special knowledge is 
low, and equally low is her standard of patriotism. 

All these things we know, and worse, and they vex us 
and discourage us, and some there are among us who 
wish that we had a heaven-descended aristocracy, an 
aristocracy of brains at least, who could take these 
things out of the people's hands, out of your hands and 
mine, and make them and keep them right. I do not 
feel thus. It is better that the people should suffer, with 
the remedy in their own hands, than that they should be 
protected by some power not of themselves. Badly 
though the people may manage their own affairs, the 
G 



82 THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY. 

growth of the race depends upon their doing it. We 
would rather the people would rule ill through choice 
than that they should be ruled well through force. The 
Reign of Terror gives more hope for the future than the 
reign of the good King Henry. The story of the decline 
and fall of empires is the story of the growth of man. 

It is not that the laws of England should be made better 
that Gladstone took into partnership, as law- makers, two 
millions of England's farmers and workmen who can 
barely read or write. The laws for a time, at least, will 
not be as good, but those for whom the laws are made 
will be better, and the good of the people is the object 
of law. It is not our confidence in Irish wisdom and 
prudence that leads every American to approve of Home 
Rule in Ireland. It is our sympathy with Irish manhood 
and our belief that Irish manhood can manage its own 
affairs. It is not that our Southern States should be bet- 
ter governed that three millions of freedmen, little more 
intelligent in the mass than the dog or horse with which 
a few years before they had been bought and sold, were 
given the right to vote. No better for the State, per- 
haps; for an ignorant vote is a cowardly vote, and a vote 
which money will buy. No better for the State, but 
better for humanity, that her laws should recognize the 
image of God hidden in each dusky skin. For lawless- 
ness, turbulence, misgovernment is better than prosperity 
with its heel on the neck of a silent race which cannot 
rise nor speak. 

But all government by the people is made better when 
the people come to know and feel its deficiencies. No 
abuse can survive long when the people have located it. 
When the masses know what hurts them, that particular 



IDEALS OF UTOPIA. 83 

wrong must cease. Its life depends upon its appearing 
in the disguise of a public blessing. Straight thinking, 
as you have learned, comes before straight acting, and 
both we expect of you. To you, as educated men and 
women, the people have a right to look. They have a 
right to expect your influence in the direction of the 
ideal government, the republic in which government by 
the people shall be good government as well; the govern- 
ment from which no man nor woman shall be excluded, 
and in which no man nor woman shall be ignorant, or 
venal, or corrupt. 

The influence of the university life is in the direction 
of high ideals. The trained mind is the best keeper of 
the clear conscience. It is the duty of the university to 
fill the student's mind with high notions of how his per- 
sonal, social, and political life ought to be conducted and 
to lead him toward discontent with that which is on a 
lower plane. You have all heard it said that certain 
reforms in American life are advocated only by college 
professors and by boys just out of college. It is said 
that these notions of college boys would be admirable in 
Utopia, but are ridiculous in nineteenth-century America. 
We are told that self-seeking and corruption are essen- 
tial elements in our American life. That in our poHtical 
and social battles we must not be squeamish, but must 
fight our adversaries as devils are said to fight each 
other — with fire. Of course, this charge of Utopianism 
is in the main true, and I trust that it may remain so. 
The Utopian element is one which our life sorely needs. 
We have fought the devil with fire long enough. Too 
long have we attempted good results by evil means. 
Too long has the right been grandly victorious through 



84 THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY. 

bribery, falsehood, and fraud, till we are more afraid of 
the bad means of our friends than the bad ends of our 
adversaries. 

What though all reform seem Utopian, — does that ab- 
solve you ? Unless your soul dwells in Utopia, life is not 
worth the keeping. Your windows should look toward 
heaven, not into the gutter. You should stand above 
the level of the world's baseness and filth. If our schol- 
ars do not so stand — if our training end in the production 
merely of sharper manipulators than those we had before 
(and we know there is an undercurrent in our college life 
tending just in that direction), then the sooner we bar 
our windows and don our striped uniforms, the better for 
the country. 

But we need not take this dark view of the future. We 
know that, on the whole, training makes for virtue. 
There is a natural connection between ' ' Sweetness and 
Light. ' ' We know that whatever leads the youth to look 
beyond the narrow circle in which he stands, is his best 
safeguard against temptation. We know that if the youth 
fall not, the man will stand. I shall not argue this ques- 
tion. I assume it as a fact of experience, and it is this 
fact which gives our public-school system, of which my 
life and yours is in some degree a product, the right 
to exist. "A dollar in a university," says Emerson, 
** is worth more than a dollar in a jail. If you take out 
of this town the ten honestest merchants, and put in ten 
rogues, with the same amount of capital, the rates of 
insurance will soon indicate it, the soundness of the banks 
will show it, the highways will be less secure, the schools 
will feel it, the children will bring home their little dose 
of poison, the judge will sit less firmly on his bench, and , 



THE NATION'S NEED OF MEN. 85 

his decisions will be less upright; he has lost so much 
support and constraint, which we all need, and the pulpit 
will betray it in a laxer rule of life. ' ' If taking from the 
community ten good men and replacing them with bad 
men work this evil, what will come from doing the 
reverse ? If we add ten good men — one good man — 
to any community, the banks, the courts, the churches, 
the schools will feel it as an impulse toward better 
things. 

The statesmanship of every nation has regarded the 
development of higher education as a plain duty to itself. 
The great universities of the world have arisen, not from 
the overflow of riches, but from the nation' s need of men. 
The University of Leyden was founded in the darkest 
days of Holland' s history as the strongest barrier Holland 
could raise against Spanish oppression — as the most 
effective weapon she could place in the hands of William 
the Silent. 

For the State — that is, every man in the State — is 
helped and strengthened by all that makes its members 
wiser, better, or more enlightened. That you are edu- 
cated, if educated aright, tends to raise the price of 
every foot of land around you. When Emerson, and 
Hawthorne, and Thoreau lived in Concord, this fact was 
felt in the price of every city lot in Concord. Men from 
other towns were willing to pay money in order to live 
near them. When a smart lawyer, a few years ago, was 
elected governor of Massachusetts, there were men who 
left that State rather than that he should be their gov- 
ernor. You and I are not so sensitive, perhaps; but 
however that may be, the election of a bad man as gov- 
ernor will be felt in the falling price of land and houses, 



86 THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY. 

in the falling price of honesty and truth in the markets 
of the nation. 

As in political, so in social life, should the student 
stand as a barrier against materialism. Not alone against 
the elaborate materialism of the erudite philosopher. Its 
virus, dry and dusty, attenuated by its transfer from 
Germany, can rarely do much harm. But there is a 
subtler materialism which pervades our whole life. It 
sits in the cushioned pews of our churches, as well as in 
our marts of trade. It preaches the gospel of creature 
comforts and the starvation of the spirit. It preaches 
the gospel of selfhood, instead of the law of love. It 
asks of all the scholar should hold dear, — of truth, and 
beauty, and goodness, and sweetness, and light, — what 
are these things worth? If they will bring no money 
in this world, nor save our souls in the next, we want 
nothing of them. Wherever you go after you leave the 
college halls, you will feel the chill of this materialism. 
You must keep your sympathies warm, and your soul 
open to all good influences, to keep it away. 

There is, too, a sort of skepticism about us against 
which the scholar should be proof Once the skeptic 
was the man simply who had his eyes open; the man 
who questioned nature and life, and from such question- 
ing has all of our knowledge come. But questioning 
with eyes open is not the same as doubting with eyes 
closed. There is a doubting which saps the foundation 
of all growth, which cuts the nerve of all progress. It is 
the question of Pilate, who doubted — *'What is truth? " 
Whether, indeed, any truth exists? And whether, after 
all, being is other than seeming? 

Every robust human life is a life of faith. Not faith 



THE LIFE OF FAITH. 87 

in what other men have said and thought about life, or 
death, or fate; but faith that there is something in the 
universe that transcends man and all man's conceptions 
of right and wrong, and which it is well for man to know. 

Some forty years ago a president of the University of 
Indiana is reported to have said: ''The people insist on 
being humbugged; so it is our duty to humbug them." 
Great is the power of Humbug, and many and mighty 
are his prophets ! Do you never believe this. A pin- 
prick in the ribs will kill the charlatan, but the man who 
is genuine throughout is clad in triple armor. To him 
and to his teachings will the people turn long after the 
power of humbug is forgotten. The studies you have 
followed as a scholar should teach you to know and value 
truth. You have found some things which you should 
know as true, judged by any tests the world can offer. 

In his relations with others, the scholar must be toler- 
ant. Culture comes from contact with many minds. To 
the uncultured mind, things unfamilar seem uncouth, out- 
landish, abhorrent. A wider acquaintance with the affairs 
of our neighbor gives us more respect for his ideas and 
ways. He may be wrong-headed and perverse; but there 
is surely something we can learn from him. So with 
other nations and races. Each can teach us something. 
In civilized lands the foreigner is no longer an outcast, 
an object of fear or abhorrence. The degree of tolerance 
which is shown by any people toward those whose opin- 
ions differ from their own is one of the best tests of civ- 
ilization. It is a recognition of individuality and the rights 
of the individual in themselves and in others. 

I need not dwell on this. The growth of tolerance is 
one of the most important phases in the history of mod- 



88 THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY. 

ern civilization. The right of freedom of the mind, the 
right of private interpretation, is a birthright of humanity. 
As the scholar has taken a noble part in the struggle 
which has won for us this freedom, so should he guard 
it in the future as one of his highest possessions. It is 
each man's right to hew his own pathway toward the 
truth. If there be in this country a town, North, South, 
East, West, on the banks of the Yazoo, or the Hudson, 
or the Sacramento, where an honest man cannot speak 
his honest mind without risk of violence or of social 
ostracism, in that town our freedom is but slavery still, 
and our civilization but a barbarism thinly disguised. 

The man who speaks may be a sage or a fool; he may 
be wise as a serpent, or harmless as a calf; he may please 
us or not: yet, whatever he be, his freedom of speech is 
his American's birthright. To words, if you like, you 
can answer with words. The whole atmosphere is yours, 
from which to frame your replies. If you are right, and 
he is wrong, so much the stronger will your answer be. 
But the club, the brick, the shotgun, or the dynamite 
bomb are not the answer of the free man or the brave. 
They convince nobody; and of all oppressive laws, the 
law which is taken in the hands of the mob is the most 
despotic and most dangerous. 

The scholar should never allow himself to become a 
mere iconoclast. He has no strength to waste in con- 
troversy. Truth is non-resistant because its enemies 
cannot last. There is not much to be gained from 
tearing down. Build something better, and the old will 
disappear of itself. 

When a righteous man attempts to reform society by 
attacking an unrighteous man, the public forms a ring 



THE SEARCH FOR THE HOLY GRAIL. 89 

around the two, to see that there is fair play, and that 
truth and falsehood are given alike a fair show. Soon 
the public ceases to be interested in the question of who 
is right, and becomes interested in who is the best fellow. 

The people have the right to expect of the scholar 
growth. One of the saddest products of the college is 
that which in science is called * * arrested development. ' ' 
When the student is transplanted from the hotbed of the 
college to the cold soil of the world, his growth some- 
times ceases, to the disappointment of his friends and 
the dismay of those who have faith in higher education. 
Without that perseverance which thrives under adver- 
sity, your attainments in college will avail you little. 

You have reached one port in the journey of life; and 
of this achievement you have the right to be proud. 
But the first port is not the end of the voyage. The 
great ocean is still beyond you, and the value of the 
voyage in the long run is proportionate to the distance 
of the port for which you are bound. It takes a longer 
preparation and a larger equipment for a voyage to the 
Cape of Good Hope than for a sail to the * ' Isle of Dogs. ' ' 

The value of a life is measured by its aim rather than 
by its achievement. Loftiness of aim is essential to lofti- 
ness of spirit. Nothing that is really high can be reached 
in a short time nor by any easy route. Most men, as 
men go, aim at low things, and they reach the objects of 
their ambitions. They have only to move in straight 
lines to an end clearly visible. Not so with you. You 
are bound on a quest beyond the limit of your vision. 
There are mountains to climb, rivers to ford, deserts to 
cross on your search for the Holy Grail. The end is 
never in sight. You have always to trust and struggle 



90 THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY. 

on, parting company at every step with those who have 
chosen more accessible goals or are diverted from the 
great quest by chance attractions. ' ' Heaven is not 
reached by a single bound, ' ' nor by him who knows not 
whither he is going. 

That your aims in life are high, that you are pledged 
to a life of effort and growth, is shown by your presence 
here. Were it not so, you would never have pressed 
thus far onward. You-would be with the hundreds and 
thousands of your contemporaries who are satisfied with 
inferior aims reached in an inferior way. 

We all recognize this fact, even though we may not 
have put the thought into words. The banks recognize 
it. Without a dollar in your pocket, you can borrow 
money on the strength of your purpose. Many of you 
have already done this. You may have to do it again. 
It is right that you should. Strength of purpose is a 
legitimate capital. By your own desires and aspirations 
you are enriched. In a free country there can be but 
one poor man — the man without a purpose. 

What you have done thus far is little in itself You 
have reached but the threshold of learning. Your edu- 
cation is barely begun, and there is no one but you who 
can finish it. Your thoughts are but as the thoughts of 
children, your writings but trash from the world's waste- 
paper basket. Nothing that you know, or think, or do 
but has been better known or thought or done by others. 
The work of your lives is barely begun. You must con- 
tinue to grow as you are now growing before you can 
serve the world in any important way. But the promise 
of the future is with you. You have the power and will 
of growth. The sunshine and rain of the next century 



THE LAW OF GROWTH 91 

will fall upon you. You will be stimulated by its 
breezes, you will be inspired by its spirit. 

It is not an easy thing to grow. Decay and decline is 
easier than growth — so the trees will tell you. Growth 
is slow, and hard, and wearisome. The lobster suffers 
the pangs of death every time he outgrows and sheds his 
shell; but each succeeding coat of armor is thicker, and 
stronger, and more roomy. So with you. You will 
find it easier not to develop. It will be pleasanter to 
adjust yourself to old circumstances and to let the moss 
grow on your back. The struggle for existence is hard; 
the struggle for improvement is harder; and some there 
are among you who sooner or later will cease struggling. 
Such will be the cases of arrested development — those 
who promised much and did little, those whose educa- 
tion did not bring effectiveness. Be never satisfied with 
what you have accomplished, the deeds you can do, the 
thoughts you can think. Such satisfaction is the sting 
of old age, the feeling that the best is behind us, and that 
the noble quest is over forever. 

The scholar shall be a man of honor, one whom men 
may trust. Once a king wrote to his queen, after a 
disastrous battle: ** Madam, all is lost — all but our 
honor." When honor is saved a battle can never be 
lost. But in many of the battles and sham fights of the 
world — in most of those, perhaps, in which you will be 
called to take part, — the honor on one side or the other is 
the first thing to be lost. Some men, in entering public 
life, lay aside their consciences as Cortez burned his 
ships, that they may not be tempted to retreat toward 
honor and decency. People say, as you have heard, 
that the sense of honor in our republic is waning; that 



92 THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY. 

sentiment in politics or business is a thing of the past. 
Certainly, from Franklin, and Hamilton, and Knox, and 
Jay to some public servants we have seen, the fall has 
been great, and the descent to Avernus seems easy. We 
hear sometimes of men who possess the old-fashioned 
ideas of honor, and we associate these men with the 
knee-breeches, and wig^s, and ruffles of the same old- 
fashioned times. The moral law is growing flexible with 
use, and parts of it, like the Blue Laws of Connecticut, 
are already out of date. See to it that it is not so with 
you. In any contest fair play is better than victory. The 
essence of success is fair play. 

As honest men and women, you will often find your- 
selves in opposition to those who regard themselves as 
leaders of reform. * A cause founded on sentiment, even 
though it be righteous sentiment, cannot succeed all at 
once, and never, unless controlled by wisdom. Political 
expediency may be a wiser guide than feeling alone. 
There is some truth in the paradox that sentimentality in 
politics is more dangerous than venality, and that the 
venal man is our safeguard against the idealist and enthu- 
siast. Venality, with all its evils, is conservative, hence 

* Professor H. H. Powers has said : "A knowledge of the magnitude and 
complexity of the causes of social phenomena tends to disparage panaceas 
and all hasty efforts for social improvement. However much we may believe 
in the control of social evolution by reason and human effort, a study of 
society cannot but convince us that changes must be slow to be either whole- 
some or permanent, and that effort spent on merely proximate causes is 
ineffectual. These conclusions are not agreeable to those who organize cru- 
sades. It is one of the painful incidents of science that the student is so 
often called upon to part company with the reformer. The fervid appeals and 
enthusiastic championship by which he seeks to enlist men into a grand 
reforming mob grate harshly on the ears of one who sees the difficulties of 
bettering society, while the other sees only its desirability. After a few vain 
attempts to inoculate a little science into these reformers while they are 
charging at double-quick, the student is apt to give up the attempt and to 
seem henceforth unfriendly to reform." 



''LAISSEZ-FAIRES 93 

opposed to ill-considered action. * 'Laissez-faire ' ' is now 
a discredited principle. It is no longer possible to let 
things take their course when so many men try to find 
out what is right, and use every effort to bring it about. 
But we must remember that men can do only what is 
possible. All unscientific or sentimental tinkering with 
society, and law, and government is still "laissez-faire.'' 
The blind effort to do the impossible effects nothing. It 
is only the whirl of the water in the eddy of the stream, 
which in no way hastens or changes its flow. Man must 
first learn the direction of the currents. The efforts 
he puts forth must be in harmony with these currents, 
else his labors may hinder, and not help, real progress. 
The opposite of laissez-faire is not action simply, but 
action based on knowledge. 

To be known as an apostle or as the devotee of some 
special idea, often prevents a man from learning or from 
growing. The apostle fears to confuse his mind with 
the results of the study of social forces. The scholar 
cannot ignore these forces, and must be prepared to 
reckon with each one. But this does not justify indiffer- 
ence or obstruction. Wisdom and sobriety arise from 
the efforts of wise and sober men. Wise and sober you 
should be, if you are rightly educated. 

Not all of you will leave your names as a legacy to 
your country's history. The alumni roll of your Alma 
Mater may be at last the only list that remembers you; 
but if you have been a center of right living and right 
thinking, if the character of your neighbors is the better 
for your having lived, your life mission will have been 
fulfilled. No man or woman can do more than that. 
'*True piety," as you have heard to-day, " consists in 



94 THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY. 

reverence for the gods and help to men.* Therefore 
help men. Seek that spiritual utilitarianism whose creed 
is social perfection, and foster that intelligent patriotism 
which chastens because it loves." 

* Professor George Elliott Howard. 



VI. 
THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE.* 

THE very essence of republicanism is popular educa- 
tion. There is no virtue in the acts of ignorant 
majorities, unless by dint of repeated action the ma- 
jority is no longer ignorant. The very work of ruling 
is in itself education. As Americans, we believe in gov- 
ernment by the people. This is not that the people are 
the best of rulers, but because a growth in wisdom is sure 
to go with an increase in responsibility. 

The voice of the people is not the voice of God; but 
if this voice be smothered, it becomes the voice of the 
demon. The red flag of the anarchist is woven where 
the people think in silence. In popular government, it 
has been said, ignorance has the same right to be repre- 
sented as wisdom. This may be true, but the perpetuity 
of such government demands that this fact of represen- 
tation should help to transform ignorance into wisdom. 
Majorities are generally wrong, but only through the ex- 
perience of their mistakes is the way opened to the per- 
manent establishment of right. The justification of the 
experiment of universal suffrage is the formation of a 
training-school in civics, which, in the long run, will bring 
about good government. 

Our fathers built for the future — a future even yet 
unrealized. America is not, has never been, the best 

* Address given on Charter Day of the University of California, at Berkeley, 

March, 1893. 

95 



96 THE SCHOOL AND IHE STATE. 

governed of civilized nations. The iron-handed dictator- 
ship of Germany is, in its way, a better government than 
our people have ever given us. That is, it follows a more 
definite and consistent policy. Its affairs of state are con- 
ducted with greater economy, greater intelligence, and 
higher dignity than ours. It is above the influence of 
the two arch-enemies of the American State — the cor- 
ruptionist and the spoilsman. If this were all, we might 
welcome a Bismarck as our ruler, in place of our succes- 
sion of weak-armed and short-lived Presidents. 

But this is not all. It is not true in a changing world 
that that government "which is best administered is 
best." This is the maxim of tyranny. Good government 
may be a matter of secondary importance even. Our 
government by the people is for the people's growth. 
It is the great training-school in governmental methods, 
and in the progress which it insures lies the certain pledge 
of better government in the future. This pledge, I 
believe, enables us to look with confidence on the gravest 
of political problems, problems which other nations have 
never solved, and which can be faced by no statesman- 
ship other than 

"The right divine of man, 
The million trained to be free." 

And, in spite of all reaction and discouragement, every 
true American feels that this trust in the future is no idle 
boast. 

But popular education has higher aims than those in- 
volved in intelligent citizenship. No country can be 
truly well governed in which any person is prevented, 
either by interference or by neglect, from making the 
most of himself. *' Of all state treasures," says Andrew 



THE DUTY OF THE STATE. 97 

D. White, "the genius and talent of citizens is the most 
precious. It is a duty of society to itself, a duty which 
it cannot throw off, to see that the stock of talent and 
genius in each generation may have a chance for develop- 
ment, that it may be added to the world's stock and 
aid in the world's work." 

This truth was recognized to its fullest degree by the 
founders of our Government, and so from the very first 
provision was made for popular education. The wisdom 
of this provision being recognized, our inquiry is this : 
How far should the State go in this regard? Should 
popular education cease with the primary schools, or is it 
the duty of the State to maintain all parts of the educa- 
tional system — primary schools, secondary schools, col- 
leges, technical and professional schools, and the schools 
of instruction through investigation, to which belong the 
name of university ? 

There have been from time immemorial two schools in 
political economy — two opposite tendencies in the ad- 
ministration of government; the one to magnify, the 
other to reduce the power and responsibility of the State. 
The one would regard the State as simply the board of 
poHce. Its chief function is the administration of justice. 
In other matters it would stay its hands, leaving each 
man or institution to work out its own destiny in the 
struggle for existence. The weaker yield, the stronger 
move on. Progress must come from the inevitable sur- 
vival of the fittest. '' Laissez-faire;' (let it alone) is the 
motto, in all times and conditions. 

The opposite tendency is to make the State not just, 
but benevolent. In its extreme the State would become a 
sort of generous uncle to every man within it. It would 

H 



98 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE. 

feed the hungry, clothe the needy, furnish work for the 
idle, bounties for those engaged in losing business, and 
protection for those who feel too keenly the competition 
inherent in the struggle for existence. It would make of 
the State a gigantic trust, in which all citizens might take 
part, and by which all should be lifted from the reach of 
poverty by official tugging at the common boot-strap. 

Somewhere between these two extremes, I believe, 
lies the line of a just policy. Aristotle says that '* it is 
the duty of the state to accomplish every worthy end 
which it can reach better than private enterprise can do. ' ' 
Accepting this view of the State's duty, let us see to 
what extent education comes within its function. Edu- 
cation is surely a worthy object. Mill says: *'In the 
matter of education, the intervention of government is 
justifiable, because the case is not one in which the 
interest and judgment of the consumer are a sufficient 
security for the goodness of the commodity." 

In other words, unless the State take the matter in 
hand and make provision for something better, a cheap 
or poor article of education may be furnished, to the in- 
jury of the people. This authority of the State over the 
lower schools has been jealously guarded by the Ameri- 
can people, and the result of this care has been one of the 
chief objects of our national pride. On the other hand, 
the higher schools, and to a still greater degree the pro- 
fessional schools, of America, have been allowed to shift 
for themselves, in accordance with the doctrine of " laissez- 
fairey What has been the result ? 

*'The common school is the hope of our country.'* 
So we all agree, and this sentence stands on the letter- 
heads of half of the school officers in the West. It is 



THE VOICE OF THE MOB. 



99 



the common-school education that elevates our niasses 
above the dignity of a mob. Such slight knowledge at 
least is essential to the coherence of the State. 

**An illiterate mass of men, large or small," says Presi- 
dent White, * * is a mob. If such a mob had a hundred 
millions of heads — if it extends from ice to coral, it is 
none the less a mob : and the voice of a mob has been in 
all time evil; for it has ever been the voice of a tyrant, 
conscious of power, unconscious of responsibility. ' ' 

*'The great republics of antiquity and of the medieval 
period failed, ' ' he continues, ' * for want of that enlight- 
enment which could enable their citizens to appreciate 
free institutions and maintain them. Most of the great 
e/Torts for republican institutions in modern times have 
been drowned in unreason, fanaticism, anarchy, and blood. 
No sense of responsibility can be brought to bear on a 
mob. It passes at one bound from extreme credulity 
toward demagogues to extreme skepticism towards states- 
men; from mawkish sympathy towards criminals to blood- 
thirsty ferocity against the innocent, from the wildest 
rashness to the most abject fear. To rely on a constitu- 
tion to control such a mob would be like relying on a 
cathedral organ to still the fury of a tornado. Build your 
constitution as lordly as you may, let its ground-tone of 
justice be the most profound, let its utterances of human 
right be trumpet-tongued, let its combination of checks 
and balances be the most subtle, yet what statesman shall 
so play upon its mighty keys as to still the howling 
tempest of party spirit, or sectional prejudice, or race 
hatreds, sweeping through an illiterate mob crowding a 
continent ? ' ' 

The reformer Zwingli saw three hundred years ago 



loo THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE. 

that Protestantism meant popular education, and popular 
education meant republicanism. It meant popular edu- 
cation because the recognition of the right of the indi- 
vidual to form his own opinions made it the duty of the 
state to give him the means of making these opinions 
intelligent. It meant republicanism, because the right 
of private interpretation in religion gave the people the 
right to opinions of their own in matters of politics. 
Where the people have a mind, they must, sooner or 
later, have a voice. 

Long ago, at the end of the war, Edmund Kirke told 
us, in the Atlantic Monthly, the story of the life of a brave 
but unlettered scout, who served in Garfield's army in 
Southern Kentucky — John Jordan, ''from the head 
of Bayne. ' ' * The story, which was a true one, was 
designed to furnish a sort of running parallel between 
the lives of two brave and God-fearing men, supposed to 
be equal in ability, and equally lowly in birth. The one 
wore the general's epaulets, and still later, as we know, 
he became President of the United States, known and 
honored of all men. The other wore the rough home- 
spun garb of the scout, and now that the war is over, he 
lies in an unknown grave in the Cumberland Mountains. 
And this difference, so the story tells us, lay in this: 
* ' The free schools which Ohio gave the one, and of which 
Kentucky robbed the other ! " ' ' Plant a free school on 
every Southern cross-road, ' ' says Edmund Kirke, * ' and 
every Southern Jordan will become a Garfield. Then, 
and not till then, will the Union be redeemed," 

And so this is no idle phrase, * * The common school 
is the hope of our country, ' ' and its maintenance is a 

* The Bayne is a small tributary .of Licking River, in Kentucky. 



THE HOPE OF OUR COUNTRY. loi 

worthy object which the statesmanship of the people 
must not neglect. It is something by which all citizens 
are helped; for in the end all interests are touched by it. 

It is too late to ask in America whether this result 
could be reached in no other way. Private benevolence, 
private enterprise, the interest of religious bodies, — none 
of these has been trusted by the American people as a 
substitute for its own concerted action. In the early his- 
tory of the West, Judge David D. Banta tells us, ' ' There 
were two red rags that required but little shaking to in- 
flame the populace. One of these was sectarianism; the 
other, aristocracy." Our young democracy was in con- 
stant fear lest one or the other of these evil influences 
should enter and dominate its schools. 

And even now, while the early prejudices have in great 
part passed away, our people are especially jealous of any 
attempt on the part of any organization to turn the 
schools to its own ends. No church can touch them, 
and ultimately they are beyond the reach of any political 
party. Religion, morality, politics even, may be taught 
in them, but in the interest of religion, morality, and 
politics alone — not to advance any political party or to 
increase the following of any religious sect or coalition 
of sects. In no matter is there greater unanimity of 
feeling among our people than in this, and he must be 
an ardent partisan, indeed, who does not feel it and 
respect it. 

From another quarter we hear this objection to popu- 
lar education: The public schools render the poor dis- 
contented with poverty. The child of the common 
laborer is unwilling to remain common. The pride of 
Merrie England used to lie in this, that each peasant and 



I02 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE. 

workman was contented to be peasant and workman. 
To those who inherited the good things of the realm, it 
was a constant pleasure to see the masses below them 
contented to remain there. 

But popular education breaks down the barriers of 
caste, and therefore increases the restlessness of those 
shut in by such barriers. The respect for hereditary- 
rank and title is fast disappearing, even in conservative 
England, to the great dismay of those who have no claim 
to respect other than that which they had inherited. 

Nor has this spirit been wanting in America. My own 
great-grandfather, John Elderkin Waldo, said in Tolland, 
Connecticut, a century ago, that there would ' ' never again 
be good times in New England till the laborer once more 
was willing to work all day for a sheep's head and 
pluck." That the good times were past was due, he 
thought, to the influence of "the little schoolhouses 
scattered over the hills, which were spreading the spirit 
of sedition and equality." 

But the progress of our country has been along the 
very lines which this good man so dreaded. The spirit 
of responsibility fostered by the little schoolhouses has 
become our surest safeguard against sedition. The man 
who is intelligent and free has no impulse toward sedi- 
tion, and for this reason, the people have the right to see 
that every child shall grow up intelligent and free. They 
must create their own schools, and they have the plain 
duty to themselves in making education free to make it 
likewise compulsory. No child in America has the right 
to grow up ignorant. 

So, leaving the common schools to the State, shall the 
State' s work stop there ? Is further education different 



THE UNIVERSITY A PUBLIC SCHOOL. 103 

in its relations to the community ? Does a special virtue 
attach to reading, writing, and arithmetic which is not 
found in literature, philosophy, history, or science ? And 
shall the State give only the first, and leave the others to 
shift for themselves ? 

In Europe, education has progressed from above down- 
ward. From the first, higher education has been under 
public control, and the maintenance of universities is a 
state duty which few have ever questioned. The struggle 
for public control in England has concerned only the 
lower schools, not the universities. The school problem in 
England to-day is the absurd one of how to make educa- 
tion compulsory without at the same time making it free. 

In America the same traditions were inherited, and 
the founding of the first colleges on a basis of public 
funds came as a matter of course. The State univer- 
sity, maintained by direct taxation, has been a prominent 
factor in the organization of each State of the Union 
outside of the original thirteen, and most of the latter 
form no exception to the rule. And, with varying for- 
tunes, the growth of each one of these schools has kept 
pace with the growth of the commonwealth, of which it 
forms a part. 

Eighty 3''ears ago, when ignorance and selfishness 
held less sway in our legislatures than to-day, because 
the influence of a few men of ideas was proportion- 
ately greater, the Constitution of the infant State of 
Indiana provided that: *' Whereas, knowledge and 
learning generally diffused through a community being 
essential to the preservation of a free government, and 
spreading the opportunities and advantages of education 
through the various parts of the country being highly 



I04 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE, 



1 



conducive to this end, it shall be the duty" of the 
General Assembly to ' ' pass such laws as shall be calcu- 
lated to encourage intellectual, scientifical and agricultural 
improvement, by allowing rewards and immunities for 
the promotion and improvement of arts, sciences, 
commerce, manufactures, and natural history, and to 
countenance and encourage the principles of humanity, 
industry, and morality." To these ends the General 
Assembly was required ' ' to provide, by law, for a general 
system of education, ascending in a regular gradation 
from township schools to a State university, wherein 
tuition shall be gratis and equally free to all." And 
all this was guarded by a further provision * * for absolute 
freedom of worship, and that no religious test should 
ever be required as a qualification to any office of trust 
or profit," in the State of Indiana. 

It is evident from this that the pioneers of the West 
regarded the colleges as essentially public schools — as 
much so as the township schools, — and that no idea of 
separate control and support of the higher institutions 
was present in their minds. But the judgment of the 
fathers is ever open to reconsideration. That the last 
generation thought it wise that the State should provide 
for higher education is in itself no argument. What 
shall be our answer in the light of facts to-day? Let us 
recall the words of Aristotle: '' It is the duty of the state 
to accomplish every worthy end which it can reach better 
than private effort can do. ' ' 

I do not need to plead for the value of higher educa- 
tion. The man who doubts this is beyond the reach of 
argument. The men who have made our country are 
its educated men; not alone its college graduates — for 



THE MEN WHO MADE AMERICA. 105 

there is no special virtue in a college diploma, — but men 
of broad views and high ideals, to give which is the end 
of higher education. 

Moses Coit Tyler, of Cornell University, has said that 
the men of the early American colleges made success in 
the Revolutionary War possible. Discussing the effect 
of the higher institutions of learning on colonial life, he 
observes: ''Still another effect of the early colleges was 
on the political union and freedom of the colonies. To 
them we are indebted for American liberty and independ- 
ence. The colleges educated the people and hastened 
the advent of freedom by rearing the men who led the 
colonists in their uprising. It was a contest of brains 
ten years before the war. The colonies sent to their 
congresses representatives who began issuing state papers 
in which the King and Parliament expected to find crude 
arguments and railings. They were astonished to find 
in them, however, decency, firmness, and wisdom, solid- 
ity, reason, and sagacity. Chatham said: 'You will find 
nothing like it in the world. The histories of Greece 
and Rome give us nothing equal to it, and all attempts 
to force servitude on such a people will be useless.' 
And these men, ' ' continues Mr. Tyler, ' ' were the ' boys * 
of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and William and 
Mary." 

Dr. Angell has lately said that the history of Iowa is 
the history of her State university. The greatness of 
the State has come through the growth of the men the 
State has trained. If this be true of Iowa, how much 
more is it true of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Virginia, 
States which have shown more liberality toward higher 
education than Iowa has yet done. 



io6 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE. 

*'The preliminary education which many of our 
strongest men have received," says President White, 
* ' leaves them simply beasts of prey. It has sharpened 
their claws and whetted their tusks. A higher educa- 
tion, whether in science, literature, or history, not only 
sharpens a man's faculties, but gives him new exemplars 
and ideals. He is lifted to a plane from which he can 
look down upon success in corruption with the scorn it 
deserves. The letting-down in character of our National 
and State councils, has notoriously increased just as the 
predominance of men of advanced education in those 
councils has decreased. President Barnard's admirable 
paper showing the relatively diminishing number of men 
of advanced education in our public stations, decade by 
decade, marks no less the rise, decade by decade, of 
material corruption. This is no mere coincidence. There 
is a relation here of cause and effect. ' ' 

The common school is the hope of our country. In 
like manner, the high school and college are the hope of 
the common school, and the university the hope of the 
college. Each part of the system depends on the next 
higher for its standards and for its inspiration. From 
those educated in the higher schools the teachers in the 
lower must come. Lop off the upper branches of the 
tree, and the sap ceases to rise in its trunk. Cut off the 
higher schools from the educational system, and its growth 
and progress stop. Weakness at the head means paralysis 
of the members. 

In the early days, when, as Whittier tells us, "the 
people sent their wisest men to make the public laws," 
the close relation of higher education to the public wel- 
fare was recognized by all. John Adams said: "It is 



THE GROWTH OF COLLEGES. 107 

to American seminaries of learning that America is in- 
debted for her glory and prosperity. ' ' 

The early colleges were sustained, as a matter of course, 
either from public funds or from voluntary gifts, in which 
every man and woman took part. "The strongest col- 
leges," says Professor Tyler again, ''were not created 
by foreign patrons, but by the mass of the people. They 
were the children of poverty, self-sacrifice, and toil. Har- 
vard sprang from the popular heart. In its early days, 
the families of all the colonies were invited to set apart, 
each person, an annual donation for the college, a peck 
of corn or twelvepence in money. And to this invita- 
tion all responded willingly. ' ' 

This direct connection of college and people was one 
of constant mutual advantage. It intensified the public 
interest in higher education, while it constrained the col- 
lege to shape its work for the people's good. The high 
esteem accorded to the colleges led wealthy men to give 
them their attention. So it became with time the fashion 
to leave money by bequest to the colleges. In the older 
States, such money was usually given to the schools 
already established, and, through repeated bequests, 
some of these became comparatively wealthy and inde- 
pendent of the aid of the public funds. 

In the West and South, this generosity has shown 
itself rather in the founding of new institutions, instead 
of making the old ones strong. As the little towns of 
the forest and prairie grew into great cities, so it was 
supposed that, through some hidden force of vitality, the 
little colleges would grow into great universities. This 
process of planting without watermg has gone on until 
the whole country is dotted with schools, called by the 



io8 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE. 

name of college or university — on an average more than 
a dozen to each State. Some of these are well endowed, 
more ill endowed, and most not endowed at all. But 
rich or poor, weak or strong, each one serves in some 
way to perpetuate its founder's ideas and to preserve his 
name from oblivion. 

Many of these are honored names, the names of men 
who have loved learning and revered wisdom, and who 
have wished to help, in the only way possible to them, 
toward the discovery and dissemination of truth. Other 
names there are which can be honored only when the 
personality of their possessor is forgotten, men whose 
highest motive has been to secure a monument, more 
conspicuous, if not more enduring, than brass. The col- 
lege founded by rich men, and obliged to depend on the 
gifts of rich men for its continuance, is sometimes, though 
not always, forced into degrading positions on account 
of favors received or favors expected. The officers of 
more than one of our colleges dare scarcely claim their 
souls as their own for fear of offending some wealthy 
patron. There is a college in New England of old and 
honored name, in which to-day the faculty go about with 
bated breath for fear of offending two wealthy spinsters 
in the town, whose money the college hopes to receive. 

This growing dependence on the large gifts of a few 
men tends to carry our colleges farther and farther from 
the people. A school supported wholly by the interest 
on endowments too often has little care for public opin- 
ion, and hence has little incentive to use its influence 
toward right opinions. Too often it ceases to respond 
to the spirit of the times. The Zeitgeist passes it by. 
It becomes the headquarters of conservatism, and within 



A BATH OF THE PEOPLE. 



109 



its walls ancient methods and obsolete modes of thought 
are perpetuated. Such colleges need what Lincoln called 
a * ' bath of the people " — a contact with that humanity 
for whose improvement the college exists, and which it 
should be the mission of the college to elevate and inspire. 
Endowments, independent of popular influence, may be- 
come fatal to aggressiveness and to inspiration, however 
much they may give of material aid to the work of in- 
vestigation. 

It is not a misfortune to a college that it should be 
dependent on the will of the people it serves. The pio- 
neer school in the education of women (Mount Holyoke 
Seminary), has to this day neither patron nor great en- 
dowment. Its founder was a woman, rich only in zeal, 
who gave all that she had — her life — to the cause of the 
education of girls. Mary Lyon's appeal was not to a few 
rich men to give a hundred thousand apiece, the pro- 
ceeds of some successful deal in stocks or margins, but to 
the farmers, clergymen, mechanics, and shopkeepers of 
New England to give each the little he could spare. The 
prayers, and tears, and good wishes, and scanty dollars 
of thousands of good people gave to this school of faith 
and hope a most substantial foundation. 

Huber says of the University of Oxford, that when it had 
neither buildings nor land, "its intellectual importance 
was fully acknowledged. ' ' When it received vast privi- 
leges, and vast endowments, its intellectual prominence 
was obscured by the growth of forms, conventionalities, 
and sinecures. It became the stronghold of conserva- 
tism, of reaction against modern civilization and modern 
science. 

Darwin speaks of the instruction In the English uni- 



no THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE. 

versities in his time as * ' incredibly dull, ' ' and in almost 
all of their departments an absolute waste of the student's 
time. ** Half of the professors of Oxford," said a grad- 
uate of one of its colleges to me only a few days ago, 
"live on their stipends and simply soak." The strug- 
gle for existence is the basis of progress. Let all the 
professors in a university be placed beyond the reach of 
this struggle, and the influence of the university rapidly 
deteriorates. It is a law of nature, from which nothing 
can escape. Whatever is alive must show a reason for 
living. 

Not long ago Dr. Dollinger said in the University of 
Munich that there was not in all America a school which 
rose to the rank of a third-rate German university. This 
may be true, so far as privileges and endow-ments go, for 
the wolf is close to the door of even our richest colleges. 
But the usefulness of the college is not gauged by its size, 
nor by its material equipment. Ernst Haeckel, profes- 
sor in the third-class University of Jena, tells us that the 
amount of original investigation actually done in a uni- 
versity is usually in inverse ratio to the completeness 
and costliness of its equipments. In this paradox there 
is a basis of truth. 

We speak too often of the university and of its pow- 
ers or needs, as though the school were a separate crea- 
ture, existing for its own sake. The university exists 
only in the teachers which compose it and direct its ac- 
tivities. It exists for the benefit of its students, and 
through them for the benefit of the community, in the ex- 
tension of culture and the increase in the sum of human 
knowledge. Its only gain is in makmg this benefit greater; 
its only loss is in the diminution or deterioration of its 



THE WINDS OF FREEDOM, m 

influence. All questions of wealth and equipment are 
wholly subsidiary to this. The value of the university, 
then, is not in proportion to its bigness, but to its inspi- 
ration. The Good Spirit cares not for the size of its 
buildings or the length of its list of professors or stu- 
dents. It only asks, in the words of the old reformer, 
Ulrich von Hiitten, if ^' die Luft der Freiheit weht9^^ — 
whether "the winds of freedom are blowing." 

Doubtless, wealthy men would grade our roads, build 
our courthouses, conduct our courts — do anything for 
the public good, — if the State should neglect these mat- 
ters, or turn them over to private hands. But this would 
not release the people from their duty in this matter. 
The people have safety only in independence. ' ' There 
is, ' ' says President White, ' ' no system more unrepubli- 
can than that by which a nation or a State, in considera- 
tion of a few hundreds or thousands of dollars, delivers 
over its system of advanced instruction to be controlled 
and limited by the dogmas and whims of living donors 
or dead testators. In more than one nation dead hands, 
stretching out from graves closed generations gone, have 
lain with a deadly chill upon institutions for advanced 
instruction during centuries. More than one institution 
in our own country has felt its grip and chill. If we ought 
to govern ourselves in anything, it ought to be in this. ' ' 
We should trust the people to judge their own needs, 
and should have faith that eventually no real need will 
be left unsatisfied. 

But may we not depend upon the interests of some one 
or more of our religious organizations to furnish the means 
of higher education ? One of our great religious bodies, 
at least, stands ready to relieve the State of all responsi- 



112 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE. 

bility for education, higher or lower, if it may be allowed 
to educate in its own way. But the people are not will- 
ing that this should be so. They beUeve that the public 
school should be free from all sectarian influences of 
whatever sort. The other religious bodies in our midst, 
for the most part, disclaim all desire, as well as all power, 
to provide for lower education, preferring to spend their 
strength on the higher. This is apparently not on ac- 
count of the superior importance of collegiate education, 
nor because denominational influences are stronger on 
young men than on boys. It is simply because a college 
is less expensive, and can be more definitely controlled 
than can a system of lower schools. 

I shall have little to say on the subject of denomina- 
tional colleges, and nothing by way of criticism. If they 
do not stand in the way of schools of higher purpose 
and better equipment, they can do no harm. If again, 
like Yale and Harvard, they become transformed into 
schools of the broadest purpose, they cease to be, whether 
in name or not, denominational, but become, in fact, schools 
of the State. Very many of the denominational schools 
have been well equipped and well manned, and have 
fought a good fight for sound learning, as well as for the 
belief which their founders have deemed correct. But 
in too many of them the zeal of the founders has out- 
run their strength, and a pretense of doing on the part 
of a few half-starved professors has taken the place of 
real performance. 

It is certainly fair to say this of all the denominational 
colleges of America: The higher education of youth, 
pure and simple, is not, cannot be, their chief object. 
Such schools are founded primarily to promote the growth 



THE COLLEGE OF THE CHURCH 113 

and preservation of certain religious organizations. This 
is a worthy object, as all must admit; but this purpose 
we recognize as something other than simply education. 

I read not long ago an appeal from the president of 
one of our best denominational colleges. Its burden 
was this: ''Unless you are willing to see our church dis- 
appear from the West, do not let our college die." This 
recognizes the ultimate function of the denominational 
college. The church depends upon it for its educated 
men. It should furnish the leaders for the church; and 
the better trained these leaders are, the better for all the 
people. 

But this phase of education is not the State's work; 
and so no private school or church school can enter the 
State's scheme of education. To do the State's work, 
the denominational school must cease to do its own; for 
no organization can be allowed to color the water in the 
fountains of popular education. Our bill of rights, the 
State Constitution, recognizes the equal rights of all men, 
whatever their religious belief or preferences. This could 
not be the fact, if the scheme for higher education in- 
cluded sectarian colleges only; and all schools are sec- 
tarian in which the ruling body belongs by necessity and 
by right to some particular religious denomination. 

If the State have any duty toward higher education, 
the existence of denominational colleges does not release 
it from this duty, any more than the existence of Pinker- 
ton' s band of peacemakers absolves the State from its 
duty to maintain an efficient police system. It is the 
free investigation and promulgation of truth which is the 
function of the university. But the denominational school 
must also stand for the defense of certain doctrines as the 



114 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE, 

ultimate truth. The highest work demands absolute 
singleness of purpose. The school cannot serve two 
masters; and the school maintained for the special work 
of the part cannot meet the needs of the whole. 

The most unfortunate feature of higher education in 
America lies in the universal scattering of its educational 
resources. For this local pride and denominational zeal 
are about equally responsible. If it be true, as Dr. Bol- 
linger says, that among our four hundred American 
colleges and universities there is not one worthy to rank 
with the least of the eight maintained by the Kingdom 
of Prussia, whom have we to thank for this ? Not our 
poverty, for New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and IlHnois 
are not poor, even in comparison with Prussia; not our 
parsimony, for no people give more freely than we; not 
our youth, for more than half these schools are older 
than the great University of Berlin. It has been this, 
and this alone — the scattering of educational funds, pub- 
lic and private, at the demand of local ambition or local 
jealousy. It has been the creation in each State of a host 
of little colleges, each one ambitious to control the higher 
education of its vicinity, and each one more or less defi- 
nitely standing in the way of any other school which 
might rise to something better. Let us take an example: 

It was not in response to the educational needs of Kan- 
sas that four universities were founded in a single year in 
one of its real-estate towns, institutions without money 
and without credit, whose existence can be only one long 
wail for help from the rich men or rich denominations 
under whose patronage they are. There is a little 
college in the West, almost under the shadow of an ex- 
cellent State University, which for years sent forth its 



THE SCATTERING OF RESOURCES. 115 

appeals for help to denominational friends in the East, 
on the ground that it is the ' * sole educational oasis ' ' in 
the great State in which it was located. We have not 
reached the end of this. The number of our colleges 
has doubled within the last thirty years, and the increase 
in number still goes on, far outrunning the rate of im- 
provement in quality. 

* ' Within the last twenty years, ' ' said President White 
in 1874, '*! have seen many of these institutions, and I 
freely confess that my observations have saddened me. 
Go from one great State to another, and you shall find 
that this unfortunate system has produced the same 
miserable results — in the vast majority of our States 
not a single college or university worthy the name; only 
a multitude of little schools with pompous names and 
poor equipments, each doing its best to prevent the 
establishment of any institution broader and better. The 
traveler arriving in our great cities generally lands in a 
railway station costing more than all the university 
edifices of the State. He sleeps in a hotel in which 
there is embanked more capital than in the entire uni- 
versity endowment for millions of people. He visits 
asylums for lunatics, idiots, deaf, dumb, blind, — nay, 
even for the pauper and criminal, — and finds them 
palaces. He visits the college buildings for young men 
of sound mind and earnest purpose, the dearest treasures 
of the State, and he generally finds them rude barracks. 

' * Many noble men stand in the faculties of these col- 
leges — men who would do honor to any institution of 
advanced learning in the world. These men of ours 
would, under a better system, develop admirably the 
intellectual treasures of our people and the material 



ir6 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE. 

resources of our country; but, cramped by want of 
books, want of apparatus, want of everything needed 
in advanced instruction, cramped above all by the spirit 
of this system, very many of them have been paralyzed." 

This picture is by no means so dark in the West 
to-day as it was twenty- five years ago. And the reason 
for this is to be found in the rise of the State universities. 
These schools have struggled along with many vari- 
ations of fortune until within the last few years, when 
success has come to every one of them, and their develop- 
ment has become the most striking feature in our recent 
educational history. 

When the State universities cast off the self-imposed 
fetters of the conventional college and took their place 
with the public schools, supported by the public money 
and existing for the public good, their real growth began 
in friends, in numbers, in equipment, in usefulness. 
What they have deserved they have received, and they 
will receive in the future. It requires no prophet to 
foresee that before the middle of the next century these 
creatures of the public-school system will be the centers 
of the chief educational forces on our continent. They 
will cost the people many hundred dollars, perhaps, for 
every one which is expended now; but every dollar given 
to higher education shall bring its full return. The great- 
ness of the State is measured not by numbers nor by 
acres; not by dollars on the tax-roll, but by the wisdom 
of its people, by the men and women of the State who 
have learned to take care of themselves. 

It is sometimes proposed to treat all higher education 
simply as a matter of business. Let wisdom be sold in 
the open market, and let its prices be ruled by the laws 



THE COMMERCIAL BASIS. iiy 

of supply and demand. The college professor deals in 
mental wares, as the shopkeeper deals in material com- 
modities. Let him fill his store with a stock which the 
people will buy, and advertise what he has, as the shop- 
keeper does. On this basis he will not carry a dead 
stock long. There is no room for conservatism in com- 
merce. This is a commercial age, and professors should 
govern themselves accordingly. If the people want book- 
keeping or dancing instead of Latin and Greek, they can 
have it. If the people retain the old prejudice in favor 
of classical training, they can have classical courses of 
the latest Chautauqua pattern, all in English, all the 
play left in and all the work left out. Busy people can 
then attend the universities without interruption of their 
daily work, while the law of supply and demand will 
regulate everything. Commerce can have no difficulty 
in modernizing the curriculum. The latest fashions 
might be quoted in education as well as in millinery. 

This could have no result except to cheapen and vul- 
garize the college. The highest need is not the need of 
the many; still less is it the multitude's demand. Inves- 
tigations without immediate pecuniary result would find 
still less encouragement than now. Vulgarity is the 
condition of satisfaction with inferior things. A college 
dependent each day on the day' s receipts must pander 
to vulgarity. And vulgarity, too, is said to be the 
besetting sin of democracy. If democracy leads to 
vulgarity, it defeats its own ends. The justification of 
popular suffrage is to make the multitude better, not to 
bring the better to the level of the multitude. The many 
are ready only for the rudiments. The teacher of ad- 
vanced subjects would starve in open financial competi- 



ii8 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE. 

tion, while the teacher who could train the many to keep 
account-books or to get a six-months' license would be 
exalted. If, on the other hand, the fees of the higher 
teacher were proportionately increased, only the rich 
could make use of him, and the rich would find their 
purposes better served in the endowed schools of other 
countries. 

The demand for many students rather than good ones, 
already too strong in our colleges, would be intensified, 
if everj^thing were left to business competition. The 
whole category of advertising dodges known to the deal- 
ers in quack medicines or ready-made clothing would 
become a permanent part of our higher education. A 
cheap article furnished at a low price meets with a won- 
derful sale. We do not need to trust to theory in this 
matter. In Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, and Kansas, 
are some two-score private schools called colleges. These 
schools are run without endowment or equipment on the 
plan of free competition, and for the purpose of making 
money. One has not to visit many of these to see clearly 
what would be the result of trusting higher education 
solely to business enterprise. Any form of educational 
charity, private gifts, public spirit, denominational zeal, 
anything leads to better results than this. For the essence 
of education is something that cannot be bought and sold. 
It is the inspiration of character, which cannot be rated 
in our stock exchanges. 

If quick sales and steady profits are to be the watch- 
word of educational progress, the student of the future 
will look toward Lebanon and Valparaiso, rather than to- 
ward Johns Hopkins or Harvard, and the great expendi- 
tures which New York, and Michigan, and Wisconsin, 



MANAGEMENT BY THE PEOPLE. 119 

and California have made for higher education will be 
a needless waste. 

But it is said sometimes that the State cannot properly 
manage its own institutions. Ignorance and venality are 
often dominant in public affairs, and it is claimed that 
work undertaken in the name of the people is sure to be 
marred by ignorance, affected by partisanship, or tainted 
by jobbery. The first professor in the State University 
of Indiana, Baynard R. Hall, said sixty-five years ago: 
"Nothing, we incline to believe, can ever make State 
schools and colleges very good ones; but nothing can 
make them so bad as for Uncle Sam to leave every point 
open to debate, especially among ignorant, prejudiced, 
and selfish folks, in a new purchase. ' ' 

This question touches the very foundation of popular 
government. In the beginning, as a rule, the affairs of 
the State are not well administered. Many trials are 
made. Many blunders are committed before any given 
piece of work falls into the hands of competent men. 
But mistakes are a source of education. Sooner or later 
the right men will be found, and the right management 
of a public institution will justify itself. What is well 
done can never be wholly undone. In the long run, few 
institutions are less subject to partisan influence than a 
State school. When the foul grip of the spoilsman is 
once unloosed, it can never be restored. In the evil days 
which befell the politics of Virginia, when the fair name 
of the State was traded upon by spoilsmen of every party, 
of every degree, the one thing in the State never touched 
by them was the honor of the University of Virginia. And 
amid all the scandal and disorder which followed our 
Civil War, what finger of evil has been laid on the Smith- 



I20 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE. 

sonian Institution or the Military Academy at West Point? 
On that which is intended for no venal end, the people 
will tolerate no venal domination. In due time the 
management of every public institution will be abreast 
of the highest popular opinion. Sooner or later the 
wise man leads; for his ability to lead is at once the test 
and proof of his wisdom. 

Charities under public control result badly, not because 
of the theory, but because of certain relations in prac- 
tice. Their bad effects tend to increase and perpetuate 
themselves, because every organization tends to magnify 
its function; and the sole legitimate function of public 
charity is to make public charity unnecessary. State 
schools are not good at first, because under control of 
unstable forces. They tend to grow better and better; 
for they tend to draw these forces into a following. All 
schools tend to improve, because they make their own 
following. In the same way all charities tend to degen- 
erate, because goodness in this case consists in being 
needed just as little as possible. Neither schools nor 
charities are industrial investments, and they are not sub- 
ject to the laws which govern enterprises for profit. 

Methods must be judged by their results. Co-opera- 
tion in higher education is always legitimate, because 
those to be educated have not the money which great 
enterprises cost. Co-operation, on the one hand, and ap- 
preciation, on the other, are necessary to build up schools. 
In similar ways, we must test the best method of carry- 
ing out any enterprise. Dr. Amos G. Warner says that 
if it were found that better results and a better quality 
of air came from placing the atmosphere in private hands, 
or using it as a municipal monopoly, he would favor do- 



CO-OPERATION IN EDUCATION. 121 

ing so. Matters of this kind cannot be settled by theory, 
but by experiment. 

I need say but a word on the subject of applied educa- 
tion. 

Shall the people provide for technical or professional 
training, as well as for general education? My answer 
is, Yes; for no other agency will do as well as the State 
the work that should be done. 

Already the General Government has recognized the 
need of industrial training, and has made liberal provi- 
sion for it. Special grants of land and money have been 
made to each State for the purpose of carrying on instruc- 
tion and investigation in the line of mechanics, engineer- 
ing and agriculture. Each State has accepted this trust, 
and in each the work is being carried out with fidelity 
and with success. 

My conclusions may be summed up in a few words : 

In every demand the people make, the State must fur- 
nish the means for satisfaction. Whatever schools the 
State may need, the State must create and control. 

If the State fails to furnish the means of education, 
higher or lower, these means will never be adequately 
furnished. The people must combine to do this work; 
for in the long run no other agency can do it. Moreover, 
any other • means of support, sooner or later, forms the 
entering wedge between the schools and the people. 

The first constitution of several of our States contained 
the embodiment of educational wisdom, when it provided 
for a general system of education, ascending in regular 
gradation, from the township schools to the State univer- 
sity — free and equal, open to all, and equally open to all 
forms of religious belief. 



122 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE. 

The State of California, following the lead of Michi- 
gan, did wisely when it added to this the provision for 
special training in all lines of technical and professional 
work in which the skill or the wisdom of the individual 
tends toward the advantage of the community or the 
State. Its next duty in this regard is to make this pro- 
vision adequate, that these professional schools may be 
capable of doing well what they attempt to accomplish. 



VII. 
THE HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN. 

THE subject of the higher training of young women 
may resolve itself into three questions: 

1. Shall a girl receive a college education f 

2. Shall she receive the same kind of a college educa- 
tion as a boy f 

3. Shall she be educated in the same college? 

As to the first question: It must depend on the char- 
acter of the girl. Precisely so with the boy. What we 
should do with either depends on his or her possibilities. 
No parents should let either boy or girl enter Jife with 
any less preparation than the best they can give. It is 
true that many college graduates, boys and girls alike, 
do not amount to much after the schools have done the 
best they can. It is true, as I have elsewhere insisted, 
that "you cannot fasten a two- thousand-dollar education 
to a fifty-cent boy," — or girl either. It is also true that 
higher education is not alone a question of preparing 
great men for great things. It must prepare even little 
men for greater things than they would otherwise have 
found possible. And so it is with the education of- 
women. The needs of the times are imperative. The 
highest product of social evolution is the growth of the 
civilized home — the home that only a wise, cultivated, 

123 



124 THE HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN. 

and high-minded woman can make. To furnish such 
women is one of the worthiest functions of higher educa- 
tion. No young woman capable of becoming such should 
be condemned to anything lower. Even with those who 
are in appearance too dull or too vacillating to reach any 
high ideal of wisdom, this may be said — it does no 
harm to try. A few hundred dollars is not much to 
spend on an experiment of such moment. Four of the 
best years of one's life spent in the company of noble 
thoughts and high ideals cannot fail to leave their 
impress. To be wise, and at the same time womanly, 
is to wield a tremendous influence, which may be felt for 
good in the lives of generations to come. It is not forms 
of government by which men are made or unmade. It 
is the character and influence of their mothers and their 
wives. The higher education of women means more for 
the future than all conceivable legislative reforms. And 
its influence does not stop with the home. It means 
higher standards of manhood, greater thoroughness of 
training, and the coming of better men. Therefore, let 
us educate our girls as well as our boys. A generous 
education should be the birthright of every daughter of 
the republic as well as of every son. 

2. Shall we give our girls the same educafio7i as our 
boys f Yes, and no. If we mean by the same an equal 
degree of breadth and thoroughness, an equal fitness for 
high thinking and wise acting, yes, let it be the same. 
If we mean this: Shall we reach this end by exactly the 
same course of studies? then my answer must be, No. 
For the same course of study will not yield the same 
results with different persons. The ordinary ''college 



INDIVIDUAL TRAINING. 125 

course'* which has been handed down from generation 
to generation is purely conventional. It is a result of a 
series of compromises in trying to fit the traditional edu- 
cation of clergymen and gentlemen to the needs of men 
of a different social era. The old college course met the 
needs of nobody, and therefore was adapted to all alike. 
The great educational awakening of the last twenty years 
in America has lain in breaking the bonds of this old 
system. The essence of the new education is individual- 
ism. Its purpose is to give to each young man that 
training which will make a man of him. Not the train- 
ing which a century or two ago helped to civilize the 
mass of boys of that time, but that which will civilize 
this particular boy. One reason why the college stu- 
dents of 1895 ^'^^ ten to one in number as compared with 
those of 1875, is that the college training now given is 
valuable to ten times as many men as could be reached 
or helped by the narrow courses of twenty years ago. 

In the university of to-day the largest liberty of choice 
in study is given to the student. The professor advises, 
the student chooses, and the flexibility of the courses 
makes it possible for every form of talent to receive 
proper culture. Because the college of to-day helps ten 
times as many men as that of yesterday could hope to 
reach, it is ten times as valuable. This difference lies in 
the development of special lines of work and in the 
growth of the elective system. The power of choice 
carries the duty of choosing rightly. The ability to 
choose has made a man out of the college boy and trans- 
ferred college work from an alternation of tasks and play 
to its proper relation to the business of life. Meanwhile 
the old ideals have not risen in value. If our colleges 



126 THE HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN, 

were to go back to the cut-straw of medievalism, to their 
work of twenty years ago, their professors would speak 
to empty benches. In those colleges which still cHng 
to these traditions the benches are empty to-day — or 
filled with idlers, which to a college is a fate worse than 
death. 

The best education for a young woman is surely not 
that which has proved unfit for the young man. She is 
an individual as well as he, and her work gains as much 
as his by relating it to her life. But an institution which 
meets the varied needs of varied men can also meet the 
varied needs of the varied women. The intellectual 
needs of the two classes are not very different in many 
important respects. The special or professional needs, 
so far as they are different, will bring their own satisfac- 
tion. Those who have had to do with the higher train- 
ing of women know that the severest demands can be 
met by them as well as by men. There is no demand 
for easy or ** goody-goody" courses of study for women 
except as this demand has been encouraged by men. In 
this matter the supply has always preceded the demand. 

There are, of course, certain average differences 
between men and women as students. Women have 
often greater sympathy or greater readiness of memory 
or apprehension, greater fondness for technique. In the 
languages and literature, often in mathematics and his- 
tory, they are found to excel. They lack, on the whole, 
originality. They are not attracted by unsolved prob- 
lems and in the inductive or "inexact" sciences, they 
seldom take the lead. The * * motor ' ' side of their minds 
and natures is not strongly developed. They do not 
work for results as much as for the pleasure of study. 



THE WOMAN'S COLLEGE. 127 

In the traditional courses of study — traditional for 
men — they are often very successful. Not that these 
courses have a fitness for women, but that women are 
more docile and less critical as to the purposes of edu- 
cation. And to all these statements there are many 
exceptions. In this, however, those who have taught 
both men and women must agree; the training of women 
is just as serious and just as important as the training 
of men, and no training is adequate for either which falk 
short of the best. 

3. Shall women be taught in the same classes as fnen f 
This is partly a matter of taste. It does no harm what- 
ever to either men or women to meet those of the other 
sex in the same classrooms. But if they prefer not to do 
so, let them do otherwise. Considerable has been said 
for and against the union in one institution of technical 
schools and schools of liberal arts. The technical qual- 
ity is emphasized by its separation from general culture. 
But I believe better men are made where the two are not 
separated. The culture studies and their students gain 
from the feeling of reality and utility cultivated by tech- 
nical work. The technical students gain from associa- 
tion with men and influences of which the aggregate 
tendency is toward greater breadth of sympathy and a 
higher point of view. 

A woman's college is more or less distinctly a technical 
school. In most cases, its purpose is distinctly stated 
to be such. It is a school of training for the profession 
of womanhood. It encourages womanliness of thought 
as more or less different from the plain thinking which is 
called manly. The brightest work in women's colleges 



128 THE HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN. 

is often accompanied by a nervous strain, as though 
its doer were fearful of falling short of some outside 
standard. The best work of men is natural, is uncon- 
scious, the normal result of the contact of the mind with 
the problem in question. 

In this direction, I think, lies the strongest argument 
for co-education. This argument is especially cogent 
in institutions in which the individuality of the student 
is recognized and respected. In such schools each man, 
by his relation to action and realities, becomes a teacher 
of women in these regards, as, in other ways, each culti- 
vated woman is a teacher of men. 

In woman's education, as planned for women alone, 
the tendency is toward the study of beauty and order. 
Literature and language take precedence over science. 
Expression is valued more highly than action. In carry- 
ing this to an extreme, the necessary relation of thought 
to action becomes obscured. The scholarship developed 
is ineffective, because it is not related to success. The 
educated woman is likely to master technique, rather than 
art; method, rather than substance. She may know a 
good deal, but she can do nothing. Often her views 
of life must undergo painful changes before she can find 
her place in the world. 

In schools for men alone, the reverse condition often 
obtains. The sense of reality obscures the elements 
of beauty and fitness. It is of great advantage to both 
men and women to meet on a plane of equality in edu- 
cation. Women are brought into contact with men who 
can do things — men in whom the sense of reality is 
strong, and who have definite views in life. This influ- 
ence effects them for good. It turns them away from 



IDEALS RATHER THAN CAPRICE. 129 

sentimentalism. It is opposed to the unwholesome state 
of mind called *' monogamic marriage." It gives tone 
to their religious thoughts and impulses. Above all, it 
tends to encourage action as governed by ideals, as op- 
posed to that resting on caprice. It gives them better 
standards of what is possible and impossible when the 
responsibility for action is thrown upon them. 

In like manner, the association with wise, sane, and 
healthy women has its value for young men. This value 
has never been fully realized, even by the strongest advo- 
cates of co-education. It raises their ideal of woman- 
hood, and the highest manhood must be associated with 
such an ideal. This fact shows itself in many ways; but to 
point out its existence must suffice for the present paper. 

At the present time, the demand for the higher educa- 
tion of women is met in three different ways: 

1. In separate colleges for women, with courses of 
study more or less parallel with those given in colleges 
for men. In some of these the teachers are all women, 
in some mostly men, and in others a more or less equal 
division obtains. In nearly all of these institutions, 
those old traditions of education and discipline are more 
prevalent than in colleges for men, and nearly all retain 
some trace of religious or denominational control. In 
all, the Zeitgeist is producing more or less commotion, 
and the changes in their evolution are running parallel 
with those in colleges for men. 

2. In annexes for women to colleges for men. In these, 
part of the instruction given to the men is repeated for 
the women, though in different classes or rooms, and 
there is more or less opportunity to use the same libra- 

y 



I30 THE HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN, 

ries and museums. In some other institutions, the rela- 
tions are closer, the privileges of study being similar, 
the difference being mainly in the rules of conduct by 
which the young women are hedged in, the young men 
making their own. 

It seems to me that the annex system cannot be a per- 
manent one. The annex student does not get the best 
of the institution, and the best is none too good for her. 
Sooner or later she will demand it, or go where the best 
can be found. The best students will cease to go to the 
annex. The institution must then admit women on equal 
terms, or not admit them at all. There is certainly no 
educational reason why a woman should prefer the annex 
of one institution when another equally good throws its 
doors wide open for her. 

3. The third system is that of co-education. In this 
system young men and young women are admitted to 
the same classes, subjected to the same requirements, 
and governed by the same rules. This system is now 
fully established in the State institutions of the North 
and West, and in most other colleges in the same region. 
Its effectiveness has long since passed beyond ques- 
tion among those familiar with its operation. Other 
things being equal, the young men are more earnest, 
better in manners and morals, and in all ways more civ- 
ilized than under monastic conditions. The women do 
more work in a more natural way, with better perspect- 
ive and with saner incentives than when isolated from the 
influence and society of men. There is less of silliness 
and folly where a man is not a novelty. In co-educational 
institutions of high standards, frivolous conduct or scan- 
dals of any form are unknown. The responsibility for 



THE COLLEGE WOMAN. 131 

decorum is thrown from the school to the woman, and 
the woman rises to the responsibility. Many professors 
have entered Western colleges with strong prejudices 
against co-education. These prejudices have never 
endured the test of experience. What is well done has 
a tonic effect on the mind and character. The college 
girl has long since ceased to expect any particular leni- 
ency because she is a girl. She stands or falls with the 
character of her work. 

It is not true that the character of college work has 
been in any way lowered by co-education. The reverse 
is decidedly the case. It is true that untimely zeal of one 
sort or another has filled the West with a host of so-called 
colleges. It is true that most of these are weak and 
doing poor work in poor ways. It is true that most of 
these are co-educational. It is also true that the great 
majority of their students are not of college grade at all. 
In such schools, low standards rule, both as to scholar- 
ship and as to manners. The student fresh from the 
country, with no preparatory training, will bring the 
manners of his home. These are not always good man- 
ners, as manners are judged. But none of these defects 
are derived from co-education; nor are any of these con- 
ditions in any way made worse by it. 

A final question: Does not co-education lead to mar- 
riage? Most certainly it does; and this fact need not 
be and cannot be denied. But such marriages are not 
usually premature. It is certainly true that no better 
marriages can be made than those founded on common 
interests and intellectual friendships. 

A college man who has known college women is not 
drawn to those of lower ideals and inferior training. His 



132 THE HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN. 

choice is likely to be led toward the best he has known. 
A college woman is not led by propinquity to accept the 
attentions of inferior men. 

I have before me the statistics of the faculty of a uni- 
versity open to both sexes alike. Of the eighty profes- 
sors and instructors, twenty-seven men and women are 
still unmarried. Of the remaining fifty-three, twenty-one 
have taken the Bachelor's degree in co-educational insti- 
tutions, and have married college associates; twelve, 
mostly from colleges not co-educational, have married 
women from other colleges, and in twenty cases the wives 
are not college graduates. 

It will be seen, then, that nearly all those who are 
graduates of co-educational colleges have married col- 
lege friends. In most cases college men have chosen 
college women; and in all cases both men and women 
are thoroughly satisfied with the outcome of co-educa- 
tion. It is part of the legitimate function of higher 
education to prepare women, as well as men, for happy 
and successful lives. 

An Eastern professor, lately visiting a Western State 
university, asked one of the seniors what he thought 
of the question of co-education. 

**I beg your pardon," said the student; "what ques- 
tion do you mean ? ' ' 

**Why, co-education," said the professor; "the edu- 
cation of women in colleges for men. ' ' 

"Oh," said the student, "co-education is not a 
question here." 

And he was right. Co-education is never a question 
where it has been fairly tried. 



VIII. 
THE TRAINING OF THE PHYSICIAN.* 

IT IS a matter of common observation that the various 
elements in the educational fabric of America are not 
in any proper sense parts of an educational system. 
Each kind of school has developed in its own way, in 
response to a special demand, or in furtherance of some 
educational tradition. Our colleges are English in blood 
and ancestry, our universities German. Our academies 
are children of the colleges, and our high schools and 
professional schools are for the most part wholly distinct 
in their origin and native to our soil. They have arisen 
in obedience to the law of supply and demand, and their 
methods and ideals are often wholly at variance with 
those of the colleges. 

There have been some good results arising frojn these 
conditions. The progress of evolution is most rapid 
where the chains of tradition are weakest. These chains 
have been strongest in our colleges; and of all our schools 
our colleges have been until lately the least progressive. 
The chains of tradition have been weakest in our profes- 
sional schools; but all that they have gained in freedom 
has been more than lost by their separation from other 
educational agencies. The bad results of our lack of 
correlation have been numerous and positive. Among 
these have been the general weakness of the whole sys- 

* Commencement address at Cooper Medical College, San Francisco, 1892; 
reprinted from Occidental Medical Times, January, 1893. 

133 



134 THE TRAINING OF THE PHYSICIAN. 

tern and a prodigious waste of strength throughout its 
parts. Much of the best of the educational thought of 
the day is devoted to the work of bringing together and 
properly dovetailing the scattered parts of our system. 
To consider a single one of these problems, the relation 
of medical education to the college education, is the pur- 
pose of the present paper. 

The Bachelor's degree, as generally understood, is an 
index of general culture, the mark of that degree of 
training which fairly prepares a bright man to enter upon 
professional work. The colleges have, as a rule, regarded 
this standard as a low one, rather than a high one, and 
with the improvement of our educational methods, the 
requirements for this degree have been steadily advanced. 
Better work and more of it is necessary for graduation 
with each succeeding class. The result of this is, that 
the student who has spent all his life in the schools is not 
through college and ready to begin his professional 
studies much before the age of twenty-two, while the 
man who is forced by any reason to interrupt his school 
work may be anywhere from twenty-five to thirty years 
of age on graduation. 

This fact has led to a demand for the shortening of 
the college course in the interests of practical life. The 
medical faculty of Harvard University has led in this 
demand in the interest of professional studies, and the 
question of reducing the college course from four years 
to three, has become a subject of general discussion. It 
is, of course, evident that there is no special virtue in 
four years of work, as opposed to three, or to five, or to 
any other particular number; nor is there any universal 
agreement at present as to the separation of the work of 



IS THE COLLEGE COURSE TOO LONG? 135 

the colleges from that of the high school or academy. 
That the standard of requirement for admission at Har- 
vard is unusually high may be in itself a valid reason for 
lowering the requirements for graduation in Harvard. In 
that case, however, the discussion of the question would 
practically concern Harvard University alone. 

But viewing the subject from the side of the student 
of medicine, this question is before us: Is the college 
course too long? That it is so, is practically the verdict 
of the medical schools as well as of the great body of phy- 
sicians themselves. The medical colleges have made 
the preliminary training a matter of luxury, rather than 
of necessity, by putting into the same classes, under the 
same instruction, the graduates of colleges and persons 
who come from the country district school. If general 
culture be essential to professional success, the medical 
college should say so to those who enter its doors. So far 
as any official action in most of our medical colleges is 
concerned, the illiterate boor, if he can sign the matricula- 
tion book, is as ready for medical education as the most 
accomplished college graduate. 

The physicians of our country say the same thing; for 
the number of college-bred men in medicine is lower 
than in almost any other profession. Statistics furnished 
me by Professor Richard G. Boone, show that in the 
United States at present, about one clergyman in four, 
one lawyer in five, and one physician in twelve, has had 
a college education. Connected with the lack of pre- 
paratory training on the part of medical students, there 
are certain recognized facts, one of which is this : Taking 
the country over, of all classes of students, those in 
medicine are as a rule (though such a rule admits of 



136 THE TRAINING OF THE PHYSICIAN. 

many individual exceptions) the most reckless in their 
mode of life and the most careless of the laws of hygiene, 
and of decencies in general, of any class of students 
whatsoever. This is not so true now as it was a few 
years ago. For this change the rising standards of our 
medical schools are certainly responsible. This change 
results directly from making it more difficult for unculti- 
vated men to win the Doctor's degree, and indirectly 
from bringing better men into the field as competitors. 
Already there is a good deal of crowding at the bottom 
of the stairs in the profession; and in view of this fact 
the scramble for the name of doctor is somewhat abating. 

A concerted effort is now being made to raise the 
standard of the profession of medicine by raising the 
general culture of physicians. Its purpose is to make 
medicine a worthy branch of applied science, and its 
votaries men to whom the word Science is not an empty 
name. It has been a frequent reproach to the medical 
profession that physicians are not doing their part in this 
age of scientific investigation and discovery, in a time 
when the boundaries of knowledge are widening in every 
direction at a rate of progress never before known. 

It is said that, although their work brings them into 
daily contact with the very subjects over which the 
battles of science are being waged, they know nothing 
of the struggle and have no share in the victory. Right 
in the path of the physician lie the great problems of the 
nature of heredity, of psychology, histology, sociology, 
criminology — the manifold problems of all the laws of 
life. Individual physicians have found out many things 
— much more than the world outside has recognized; 
but the profession at large is not interested in these mat- 



BRING IN BETTER MEN. 137 

ters. Although not one of these problems is alien to the 
daily work of any physician, the average practitioner 
neither knows what is already known nor what is yet to 
be found out. 

When our physicians are ready for it, the whole ad- 
ministration of criminal law will be turned over to them. 
The responsibility for crime or craziness cannot be fixed 
by jurisprudence. The criminal cannot be cured by law, 
and no good end is served by the punishments the law 
metes out. He can perhaps be healed. If incurable, he 
can be kept in confinement; and to physicians, and to 
them alone, the community must look for help in these 
matters. 

If our physicians be deficient in general culture, and 
if it be true that they are not taking their share in the 
progress of science, may not these facts be associated ? 
May we not have here the relation of cause and effect ? 
What then is the remedy? Is it not this? Bring in 
better men; shut out from the medical profession the 
ignorant, the trifling, and the unambitious, the tinker 
and the job-worker, and reserve the training of our 
medical schools for those who can bring to their work 
the instincts, the traditions, and the outlook of the scholar. 

A writer has lately maintained that a man without in- 
dependent means should not study medicine. The phy- 
sician can no longer be sure of earning his living in our 
cities on account of the competition of the free dispen- 
saries. Whether the free dispensary be a wise charity 
or not, is perhaps an open question. But surely the skill- 
ful physician has a field which the free dispensary cannot 
invade. The physician we dream of is something more 
than the automatic dispenser of drugs. Skill and wis- 



138 THE TRAINING OF THE PHYSICIAN. 

dom will always be valued and paid for. The thoroughly- 
trained man fears no competition; for it is by measure- 
ment with others that his value can be estimated. 

For the training which shall enable the medical student 
to enter on his professional work in the spirit of science 
and of scholarship, we must look to the college. To give 
this breadth and skill, to fit men and women to enter 
with large views and trained minds on the work of life, 
the college exists. The general culture of the physician 
should have its roots in the work of the college. The 
amount and the kind of culture regarded by the colleges 
in general as essential to the highest professional success, 
they have roughly estimated by their requirements for 
the degree of Bachelor of Arts. This degree, or its equiv- 
alent, has been taken by the American Academy of Medi- 
cine as its standard of admission to membership. Some 
measure of culture is better than no measure, however 
fluctuating the standard may be, and this is the only meas- 
ure which is furnished by the colleges themselves. If 
we require or recognize collegiate attainments at all, the 
Bachelor's degree furnishes the only available method 
by which general culture may be indicated. 

It is very easy to see that this standard is not absolute; 
that it means in one college something different in kind 
as well as in amount from that which obtains in another. 
Its meaning to-day is not what it was ten years ago, nor 
what it will be ten years hence. Much time has been 
spent in tabulating the different elements involved in the 
requirements for this degree in the different American 
colleges. The results are unsatisfactory; for the value 
of the degree is not to be determined by the percentage 
of required work in Greek, Latin, German, nor in any 



VALUE OF THE COLLEGE DEGREE. 139 

of the sciences. The school which shows the greatest 
amount of required work in any particular subject may 
be the very one where the least of this work is really 
done. The freedom of the elective system gives, in any 
line of work, the greatest possibilities. But the very 
fact of freedom prevents its results from appearing in a 
table of percentages. The essential fact is the extent 
to which the spirit of the scholar has been inspired in 
the student, and this varies in every case with the differ- 
ences of teacher and scholar. So this fluctuation is 
inherent in the nature of things. It is well that it should 
be so, and that its variations should be greater, rather 
than less, for its maximum indicates the unrestrained 
influence of great teachers. There are men in some of 
our colleges under whom a single year's study is better 
than many years of ordinary drill. 

Moreover, America is a broad land, and yields nour- 
ishment for many different educational ideas. In many 
cases, too, the variations in the requirements for a degree 
are more apparent than real; for the difference of sub- 
jects pursued in a college course is a very small matter 
as compared with the question whether the best years 
of youth are spent in mental training, in the demands of 
trade, or in fruitless idleness. 

Is this standard of the Bachelor's degree too high for 
the best results in professional work ? In other words, 
is the physician who has waited to secure his Bachelor's 
degree thereby handicapped in his professional life ? Has 
he lost a year or two which, in this hurrying age, he 
can never regain ? I cannot think so, and I am sure 
no such view could be sustained by statisics. Are the 
members of the American Academy less successful than 



I40 THE TRAINING OF THE PHYSICIAN. 

their brother physicians ? Is the college degree which 
they bear the mark of those who have fallen behind in 
the active work of the physician ? To state this ques- 
tion is to answer it. The broadest outlook on nature 
and human life goes with the highest professional success. 
The educated physician is the man of science. The un- 
educated physician is the quack. 

But, as I have said, our medical schools seem to think 
otherwise; for in most of them the requirement for en- 
trance, so far from being that of college graduation, is far 
less than that necessary even for entrance into the college. 
If general training be important, the schools should in- 
sist upon it. That it is not necessary in their judgment 
is apparently shown by the requirements for admission. 

This condition of things, I believe, has two causes — 
the one discreditable to the profession, the other to the 
colleges. In the first place, most of our medical schools 
are scantily endowed, or else are purely private ventures. 
It has been for them a business necessity to demand not 
the preparation they want, but that which they can get. 
In other words, they have been forced to cater to the 
desire of ignorance and impatience to take part in the 
honor and emoluments of the medical profession. For 
the same reason the standard of graduation has been kept 
low. A high standard would diminish the sale of the 
lecture tickets. The character of the profession has been 
lowered that the medical college may be self-supporting; 
for not to support itself in part at least means to close 
its doors. 

I do not mean to depreciate this class of medical 
schools; for many of our best teachers of medicine have 
belonged to them, and have given their instruction in 



TEACH MEDICINE IN THE UNIVERSITY. 141 

the intervals of an active practice. But this is not the 
ideal medical school; for no school can be effective until 
it exists for its work alone — instruction and investiga- 
tion, with no ulterior end whatever. Its teachers should 
never have to look to the interests of the cash account, 
and its examiners should never be forced to say that 
black is white at the demand of an empty treasury. 
The medical schools of the future will be sustained as 
necessary parts of university work, and the freedom 
of the university professor will be the right of the 
teacher of medicine. The medical schools have the 
same claim for support that other professional schools 
should have. They have the same claim on the interests 
of the wealthy friends of education. In the West and 
in the South, where colleges and the lower schools are 
alike maintained at the public expense, the medical schools 
have the same claim for State support that is awarded to 
other parts of the public-school system. 

When a medical school is well endowed, or has the 
State behind it, it can exact the standards the good 
of the profession requires. Till then it is at the 
mercy of the demands about it. Its students are the 
product of its surroundings, not the choice of the school 
itself. 

That the proper training of teachers is a matter of real 
economy has been recognized by every State in the 
Union, and this fact has led to the establishment of the 
State normal schools. We recognize that thorough 
professional training is the best antidote to educational 
quackery and fraud. It is cheaper for the people to pay 
for the education of the teachers, and then to pay the 
teachers an increased salary because they are educated. 



142 THE TRAINING OF THE PHYSICIAN 

than it is to depend on the haphazard training furnished 
by the law of supply and demand. 

There was a time when to be fit for nothing else was 
the chief requisite for the schoolmaster. But experience 
has shown that such teaching is the costliest of all. It 
has shown that one teacher worth two hundred dollars a 
month is more effective for educational advancement than 
ten who find their proper level at forty or fifty. 

As with teaching, so with all other professions — cheap 
work is never good. It is often said in the West, and 
this statement is applauded by our farmers and me- 
chanics, the very men who should know better, that the 
State should not support schools for the making of 
physicians and lawyers. The people should not be 
taxed to help young men into these easy professions 
already so overcrowded. 

Let us state this proposition in another form: Shall 
the State demand that the lawyers, physicians, survey- 
ors, and architects who serve its people should know 
their business ? Why not ? Have we not had enough 
of the work of frauds and fools ? The money wasted 
each year in California on quacks and quack medicines, 
revealed remedies, and blessed handkerchiefs, would 
educate every physician in the State who has the brains 
to bear education. 

Bring in better men. There is no more effective way 
of thinning out incompetent men in any profession than 
to bring trained men in competition with them. If the 
State could require each physician or lawyer to know 
what a physician or lawyer ought to know, the quacks 
and pettifoggers would disappear as surely as an army 
of tramps before a stone-pile. This country is now their 



THE AMERICAN DOCTOR. 143 

paradise. These professions are overcrowded in America 
simply because they are not professions at all. 

Not long ago the University of Berlin refused to recog- 
nize the degree of Doctor of Medicine from an American 
school as a degree at all. It is easy to see a reason for 
this. In our best schools the total educational require- 
ment for this degree is lower than in Berlin. In our worst 
schools it may fall seven years behind. One of the very 
best of our medical colleges has lately decided to raise 
the standard of admission a little each year until 1899. 
When this is done the entrance requirements will be 
those of the Freshman class in the Academic department 
of the same institution. 

American physicians are often among the most skillful 
in the world ; but this comes through individual capacity 
and through that native ingenuity with which every 
American is blest, rather than from any requirement of 
the schools. 

It was my fortune some three years ago to meet that 
which in Europe is regarded as a typical American phy- 
sician — one who was taught by nature, and not by the 
schools. He was, therefore, regarded by the people 
of rural England with a reverence which the man of 
training often fails to inspire. It was in the solemn and 
decorous village of Stratford-on-Avon that I met this 
physician. Riding on a gilded circus wagon drawn by 
four noble horses, attired in a cowboy's splendid uniform, 
in gray sombrero^ with a red serape^ accompanied by a 
band of musicians dressed as cowboys and stained as 
Indians, this man was going through England selling 
from the wagon that famous remedy of the Kickapoo 
Indians, the August Flower. It cures every disease 



144 THE TRAINING OF THE PHYSICIAN. 

known to that countryside by the simple purification 
of the blood. In one day in Stratford-on-Avon he won 
back for America all the money the Americans have 
spent on the shrine of Shakspeare within the past three 
hundred years; and on Sunday evening I saw him in- 
stalled in the famous parlors in the ancient Red Horse 
Inn at Stratford, sacred to the memory of Washington 
Irving, as the one American there worthy to dine within 
its historic walls. The scarcity of quacks in England 
made his business profitable. 

A medical student killed himself in New York the 
other day, leaving behind him these words: "I die 
because there is room for no more doctors." Over- 
crowded, poor fellow, smothered by the weight of the 
mass of his fellow-incompetents, and all this while the 
science of medicine stands on the verge of the greatest dis- 
coveries since the time of Galen and ^sculapius. * * Room 
for no more doctors," just now when the theory of evo- 
lution begins to throw its electric light down thousands 
of avenues closed to the fathers of medicine; " room for 
no more doctors, ' ' when the germ theory is working its 
revolution in surgery, obstetrics, and in the treatment 
of contagious diseases; "room for no more doctors," 
when a thousand applications of antiseptics and anes- 
thetics are yet to be made, or made in better ways; 
"no more doctors," when with the discoveries of each 
succeeding year it is more and more worth while to be 
a doctor — for each year strengthens the doctor's grip 
on the forces of sin and death. 

There is always a place for doctors; but only for men 
of the nobler sort. Their profession is not overcrowded. 
The overcrowd is outside the profession. The great 



ROOM FOR MORE DOCTORS. 145 

majority of our physicians have had only the commonest 
of school advantages. What wonder that so much of 
the world is a sealed book to them ? Men who do not 
read ' * bound books, ' ' cannot share in the advancement 
of science. 

I do not mean to depreciate in any way the work of 
the many who are really great in the noblest of all pro- 
fessions. Of our best we have the right to be proud. 
It is only when we regard the amount of ignorant, 
empirical, and dishonest work called professional that 
the record grows dark, and we doubt whether our Ameri- 
can system of medical laissez-faire can be a wise one. 

Only by the requirement of training can our profes- 
sions be restored to their ancient respectability. Their 
work must rest on a basis of science. A man who has 
spent years with the great jurists will not sell his soul 
for a twenty-five dollar fee to the first scoundrel who 
would use him. The scientific physician does not pros- 
titute his skill in any of the hundred ways condemned 
by the code of ethics. A true man cannot be used for 
base purposes. Noblesse oblige; and professional train- 
ing implies professional honor. Only the highest stan- 
dards can purge the profession of parasites and quacks; 
only honest knowledge can save us from the Christian 
scientist and the almanac. But in every demand the 
people make the State must furnish the means for 
satisfaction. 

As I have already said, there has been another reason 
why the medical student has shunned the college, name- 
ly, the tremendous waste involved in the old-fashioned, 
prescribed course; or, for that matter, in any course of 
study inflexibly prearranged. This waste is threefold. 

K 



146 THE TRAINING OF THE PHYSICIAN. 

The time spent on subjects in no wise concerned with 
the future studies of the student — thoug^hts which form 
no part of his culture; second, the time spent on sub- 
jects for which the student has no aptitude, from which 
he derives not the strength gained by mastery, but only 
the aversion felt for the unwelcome task; and third, and 
greatest of all, the waste of subjects taught by dull 
teachers, dry, dreary, or mechanical, from whom the 
student received nothing, because there was nothing in 
them to give. 

Those of us who have been through the prescribed 
course of the college have run the gauntlet of all these 
parasites on higher education. Only he who is familiar 
with the life of college boys can realize the great waste 
connected with work in wrong subjects under wrong 
teachers; and no one can estimate the number who have 
been repelled from the college by one or both of these 
evil influences. Many of those who remained to the end 
did so because their college lives were spent in the 
atmosphere of good-fellowship, not because they were 
attracted by their teachers or the work they were set 
to do 

If our medical schools cede four years to the culture 
of the colleges, they have the right to ask that the 
colleges waste no time. They cannot ask any particular 
curriculum or any special order of studies. They can 
only ask for the student the freedom of choice which shall 
enable him to steer clear of deficient teachers, and to 
work in fields from which he may in later life expect 
to reap a harvest. The college should furnish such 
means . of study that the future student shall not go to 
the medical school ignorant of the use of the scalpel 



MENTAL CULTURE NECESSARY. 147 

and the microscope. Cats are abundant and cheap. 
The elementary facts of anatomy can be learned from 
them in college far better than in the dissecting-room of 
the special school, where advanced work should be done, 
instead of the bungling efforts of beginners who do not 
know a vein from a tendon. 

The college course should also teach the medical stu- 
dent the general facts and theory of chemistry and the 
processes of chemical manipulation. The elements of 
botany and of vegetable and animal physiology should 
be in his possession; the facts of comparative anatomy, 
and the great laws of life, of natural selection, heredity, 
variability, functional activity, and response to external 
stimulus, which form the basis of organic evolution. He 
should know a bacterium when he sees it, and should 
know how to see it. He should have heard of the cor- 
relation and conservation of forces; in short, he should 
know what is meant by scientific investigation, and in 
some degree have caught the inspiration of it. The 
physician should, moreover, learn to write and speak 
good English. Besides this, he ought to — he must — 
read French and German. Other languages will not 
hurt him, nor will a knowledge of literature, philosophy, 
or history. 

Such a course of study as is here contemplated is 
actually provided in the undergraduate department of 
several of our universities. It is, however, a course of gen- 
eral culture, not a technical or professional course. This 
course, or its equivalent, is recognized as a necessary 
condition of entrance in the new medical school of Johns 
Hopkins University. No more important movement 
has been taken toward raising the standard of medical 



148 THE TRAINING OF THE PHYSICIAN. 

education in America than this recognition by Johns 
Hopkins University of the absolute necessity of mental 
culture as a requisite for professional training. 

But all that he wants the student cannot get in a four 
years' college course, no matter how fully he may crowd 
it. The whole time is little enough if every moment be 
saved. But four years is far too long if it is made a time 
for dawdling and cramming, and for merely going 
through the motions of study. Let the college permit 
the medical student to get a fair return for every hour 
he spends, and the requirement of a college degree at 
the door of the medical school will shut out no worthy 
man, nor will it hold back any in the race for life. 

Nor need the medical school fear that it will suffer 
through the neglect of the college to furnish the neces- 
sary training. Let the collegiate course be required as 
a requisite to the professional degree, and the inexorable 
law of the survival of the fittest will eliminate every waste 
teacher and every waste subject from the college course 
for the student preparing for work in medicine. 

But I do not wish to lay a disproportionate stress 
upon the college diploma. It is at the best a temporary 
thing — a mere milestone, convenient to measure from 
so long as it is in sight. The world, it has been said, 
' ' cares little for that baby badge, ' ' though it will never 
cease to care for the culture that ought to be behind it. 

Some day, our students will need the badge no longer; 
and the Bachelor's degree, with college honors, and 
prizes, and other playthings of our educational childhood 
will be laid aside. All these things are forms, and forms 
only, and our higher education is fast outgrowing them. 
The boundary line between general and professional edu- 



HOW SCHOLARS ARE MADE. 149 

cation will be broken down to the advantage of both. 
We shall have the * ' school where any person can have 
instruction in any study," and the study of the humani- 
ties need not end where the study of the human body 
is begun. Let each come who will, and let each take 
what he can, and let the ideals be so high that no one 
will imagine that he is getting where he is not. Scholars 
can be made neither by driving nor by coaxing. In any 
profession the inspiration and the example of educated 
men is the best surety that the generation which suc- 
ceeds them shall be likewise men of culture. 



IX. 

LAW SCHOOLS AND LAWYERS.* 

MR. JAMES BRYCE, writing of the universities 
of America, uses these words: "While, of all the 
institutions of the country, they are those of which the 
Americans speak most modestly, and, indeed, depre- 
catingly, they are those which seem to be at this very 
moment making the swiftest progress, and to have the 
best promise for the future. They are supplying exactly 
those things which European critics have hitherto found 
lacking in America, and they are contributing to her 
political as well as to her contemplative life elements of 
inestimable worth." 

The various influences — German, English, and Ameri- 
can — which are molding our higher education, are join- 
ing together to produce the American university. And, 
as Mr. Bryce has clearly indicated, the American 
university is becoming an institution in every way worthy 
of our great republic. Its swaddling-clothes of English 
tradition are being cast aside, and it is growing to be 
American in the high sense of adjustment to the Ameri- 
can people's needs. The academic work of the best 
American institutions is characterized by vigor and 
thoroughness, and in the free air that pervades them 
there is every promise for their future. 

But with all this, the professional schools of America 

* Published in The Forum, 1895. 
150 




THE AMERICAN LAW SCHOOL. 151 

have not taken their part in the university development. 
It has been lately said of the American law schools, for 
example, that they are the weakest, and therefore the 
worst, to be found in any civilized country. Broadly 
speaking, and taking out some half-dozen notable excep- 
tions (not so many nor so notable as they should be), 
this statement cannot be denied. Of this deficiency, its 
causes and its remedy, I propose briefly to treat in this 
paper. 

In Europe, professional training is in general the cul- 
mination of university education. It is not so in America. 
It is here rather a "practical short-cut," by which uned- 
ucated or ineducable men are helped to the rewards of 
knowledge and skill with the least possible loss of time. 
In most of our States provision is made for a system of 
public education beginning with the common schools and 
culminating in the university. The law schools, however, 
in the different States form no part of this system. They 
are rarely, even, in real alliance with it. Their place is 
with the "independent normal" and the " school of ora- 
tory." Instead of a requirement of general intelligence 
and a special knowledge of economics, history, literature, 
and language, as a preparation for the study of law, our 
law schools have been eager to admit any one who can 
pay the required fees and perchance read the English 
language. 

Instead of trained professors who make the methods 
of investigation and instruction in law the work of a life- 
time, we find in most of our law schools lawyers who 
have turned incidentally to teaching, with no knowledge 
of the methods by which teaching may be made effective. 
Some of them are young men who have not yet found 



152 LAW SCHOOLS AND LAWYERS. 

anything more serious to do. But usually the chairs of 
law are occupied by broken-down lawyers, released from 
active practice — old men who read old lectures to 
audiences inattentive or occupied with newspapers, or 
who conduct a lifeless quiz from lifeless text- books. 
Sometimes these veterans of a thousand fields are wise 
with the results of many experiences. These teachers 
may interest and inspire their students. But training 
they seldom give. Only the man with whom teaching 
is the first interest can be an effective teacher. Able 
jurists sometimes fill these chairs, men still in active 
practice, whose hour in the classroom is taken early in 
the morning or late in the afternoon, before or after the 
arduous duties of a day in court. With these men the 
court, and not the school, occupies their thought and fills 
their ambitions. 

The law students are in general assistants in law offices 
or clerks in business establishments. They devote their 
hours outside the classroom, not to library research or to 
the investigations of principles and precedents, but to 
the making of money. The law school is expected not 
to interrupt their usual vocations. The atmosphere of 
culture which surrounds every real institution of learning, 
and which it is the business of great teachers to create, 
is unknown to the average student of law. 

Often the law school appears in its register as a branch 
of some university. In most such cases this relation is 
one which exists only in name. It is a common expres- 
sion that such and such a college is * ' surrounded by a 
fringe of professional schools." These exist as stolons 
or suckers around a stalk of corn, rather than as repre- 
senting "the full corn in the ear." When a nominal 



WALKING INTO A PROFESSION. 153 

alliance exists, it rests not often on unity of purpose or 
method, but on the fact of mutual service. The reputa- 
tion of the university tends to advertise the law school. 
The roll of law students swells the apparent attendance 
of the university. By the number of names on the 
register the success of the American university is popu- 
larly measured. 

There is, besides, a strong force of precedent, which 
causes each new law school to be modeled on the lines 
of the old ones. These influences, and others, oblige 
our universities to wink at the obvious incongruity of the 
requirement of elaborate and careful preparation for the 
study of literature, chemistry, and economics, while for 
the study of law a mere reading acquaintance with the 
English language passes as adequate. More than once 
college faculties in this matter have had to subordinate 
their opinions to those of timid boards of trustees, who 
are afraid that high standards in a law school would be 
fatal to its success, measuring success in the conventional 
fashion, as boards of trustees are prone to do. 

It is thus true, as President Eliot has said, that into an 
American law school any man * ' can walk from the 
street." But in most of the States he can do better, or 
worse, than this. From the street he can walk directly 
into the profession of law, disregarding even the formulas 
of matriculation or graduation. Even the existence of 
the law school is a concession to educational tradition. 
It is possible with us to enter any one of the ** learned 
professions" with no learning whatsoever. In fact, in 
many of our States it requires no more preparation to 
be admitted to the bar than to be admitted to the saw- 
buck. Fortunately, admission to either on these terms 



154 LAIV SCHOOLS AND LAWYERS. 

carries with it no prestige or social elevation whatever. 
But the danger in the one case is greater than in the 
other. The inefficient lawyer may work the ruin of 
interests intrusted to him. The ignorant physician is 
more dangerous than the plague. The incompetent 
wood-sawyer harms only the wood-pile. A large part of 
our criminal records is devoted to legal and medical mal- 
practice. In other words, our bulk of crime is swollen 
by robbery and murder committed under the guise of 
professional assistance. When the professions cease to 
be open wide to adventurers and thieves, they will rise to 
something of their ancestral dignity. It has been said 
that the only "learned profession " in America at present 
is that of engineer. The value of knowledge and train- 
ing in the various applications of science to human affairs 
has always been recognized among us. The people have 
freely taxed themselves for industrial instruction, and it 
is now generally recognized as a necessary part of the 
State university system. The faculty in mechanic arts 
stands on an equality with the university faculties, and in 
general the standards of admission and methods of work 
in these branches compare favorably with those in any 
other field. The reason for this is not far to seek. The 
necessity of education in these lines is self-evident. Men 
cannot trifle with the forces of nature. The incompe- 
tence, or ignorance, or dishonesty of an engineer will 
soon make itself evident. The incompetence of men in 
other professions is not less disastrous, but it is more 
easily concealed. And for this reason the common man 
regards it with greater indifference. 

It seems to me that the essential weakness of the 
American law school, as well as that of our professional 



JAMES BRADLEY THAYER. 155 

schools in general, lies in the method of organization. 
They have lost their place in the university. In a recent 
address,* Professor James Bradley Thayer has these 
strong words: 

* * We must not be content with a mere lip service, with 
merely tagging our law schools with the name of a uni- 
versity, while they lack entirely the university spirit and 
character. What, then, does our undertaking involve, 
and what that conception of the study of our English 
system of law, which, in Blackstone's phrase, 'extends 
the pomoeria of university learning, and adopts this new 
tribe of citizens within these philosophical walls ' ? It 
means this: that our law must be studied and taught as 
other great sciences are taught at the universities, as 
deeply, by like methods, and with a concentration and 
lifelong devotion of all the powers of a learned and stu- 
dious faculty. If our law be not a science worthy, and 
requiring to be thus studied and thus taught, then, as a 
distinguished lawyer has remarked, 'a university will 
best consult its own dignity in declining to teach it.' 
This is the plow to which our ancestors here in America 
set their hand, and to which we have set ours; and we 
must see to it that the furrow is handsomely turned. 

' * But who is there, I may be asked, to study law in 
this way ? Who is to have the time for it and the oppor- 
tunity? Let me ask a question in return, and answer 
it. Who is it that studies the natural or physical sciences, 
engineering, philology, history, theology, or medical 
science in this way ? First of all, those who, for any 
reason, propose to master these subjects, to make true 

* '• University Teaching of English Law." Address before the American 
Bar Association, Detroit, August 27, :895. 



156 LAW SCHOOLS AND LAWYERS. 

and exact statements of them, and to carry forward in 
these regions the limits of human knowledge, and 
especially the teachers of these things; second, not in 
so great a degree, but each as far as he may, the 
leaders in the practical application of these branches of 
knowledge to human affairs; third, in a still less degree, 
yet in some degree, all practitioners of these subjects, if 
I may use that phrase, who wish to understand their 
business and to do it thoroughly well. 

" Precisely the same thing is true in law as in these or 
any other of the great parts of human knowledge. In 
all it is alike beneficial and alike necessary for the vigor- 
ous and fruitful development of the subject, for the best 
performance of the every-day work of the calling to 
which they relate, and for the best carrying out of the 
plain, practical duties of each man's place, that some- 
where, and by some persons, these subjects should be 
investigated with the deepest research and the most 
searching critical study. 

**The time has gone by when it was necessary to vin- 
dicate the utility of deep and lifelong investigations into 
the nature of electricity and the mode of its operation; 
into the nature of light, and heat, and sound, and the 
laws that govern their action; into the minute niceties 
of the chemical and physiological laboratory, the specu- 
lations and experiments of geology, or the absorbing 
calculations of the mathematician or astronomer. Men 
do not now need to be told what it is that has given 
them the steam-engine, the telegraph, the telephone, 
the electric railway and the electric light, the telescope, 
the improved lighthouse, the lucifer match, antiseptic 
surgery, the prophylactics against small-pox and diph- 



THE USE OF THOROUGH KNOWLEDGE. 157 

theria, aluminum the new metal, and the triumphs of 
modern engineering. These things are mainly the out- 
come of what seemed to the majority of mankind useless 
and unpractical study and experiment. 

* ' But, as regards our law, those who press the 
importance of thorough and scientific study are not yet 
exempt from the duty of pointing out the use of it and 
its necessity. To say nothing of the widespread skepti- 
cism among a certain class of practical men, in and out 
of our profession, as to the advantages of everything of 
the sort, there is also, among those who nominally admit 
it, and even advocate it, a remarkable failure to appreciate 
what this admission means. It is the simple truth that 
you cannot have thorough and first-rate training in law 
any more than in physical science, unless you have a 
body of learned teachers; and you cannot have a learned 
faculty of law unless, like other faculties, they give their 
lives to the work. The main secret of teaching law, as 
of all teaching, is what Socrates declared to be the secret 
of eloquence — understanding your subject; and that 
requires, as regards any one of the great heads of our 
law, in the present stage of our science, an enormous 
and absorbing amount of labor. ' ' 

This separation, which I have tried to describe, exists 
only in America. For this separation, the popular desire 
to reach these professions by short cuts, and the popular 
distrust of those who have done so, are equally respon- 
sible. 

Our people have always been willing to tax themselves 
to furnish a general education for their children. The 
common-school idea from the very first has included a 
liberal education. But in most of the States the people 



158 LAIV SCHOOLS AND LAWYERS. 

have at one time or another definitely refused to devote 
pubHc funds to the making of lawyers and doctors. 
They would not, at their expense, help men into profes- 
sions they believed to be overpaid as well as overcrowded. 
This policy has been a most shortsighted one. It has 
been responsible for the existence in every part of our 
country of hordes of pettifoggers and quacks, who rob 
the people instead of serving them. Incompetent pro- 
fessional service is always robbery. The professions are 
overcrowded simply because they have ceased to be 
professions. The remedy for incompetence is found in 
insisting on competence. This can be done by furnish- 
ing means by which competence can be possible. 

The forces which have operated here are necessarily 
associated with the growth of democracy. The move- 
ment of civilization has been constantly in the direction 
of the extension of the powers and privileges of the few 
to the many. By this influence careers and distinctions 
once reserved for the aristocracy have been opened to 
the common man. One immediate result — temporary, 
I believe, — is that the common man has invaded these 
provinces without abating one whit of his commonness. 
This is a necessary phase of the vulgarization which 
follows the extension of justice known as democracy. 
It is connected with the vulgarization of the press, the 
theater, the pulpit, which must follow their adjustment 
to the needs of the many, rather than to the finer tastes 
or juster judgment of the few. The common man is 
satisfied with common lawyers. When he ceases to be 
thus satisfied, he is no longer common. That his free- 
dom of choice and the training which results from it 
will, in the long run, eliminate this vulgarization, is the 



POOR TEACHING NOT DEMANDED. 159 

justification for democracy. Our hope for the future 
lies largely in our recognition of the badness of the pres- 
ent. From the weakness of our professional schools the 
common man is the chief sufferer. And already he is 
joining in the demand that these schools be made better. 
It is one virtue of democracy that it is free to meet 
its own demands. It is absolutely certain that those 
schools whose work is most thorough and whose require- 
ments are most exacting will have the most students, 
as well as the best ones. It is not true that the stu- 
dents of America demand poor instruction because it is 
cheap. 

Notwithstanding all adverse conditions, there have 
been many great teachers of law in America, as there 
have been and are many great lawyers. The great teacher 
makes his influence felt, whatever the defects in the 
organization of the institution which claims his services. 
The present strength of the University of Michigan 
rests in large degree on the work of Thomas M. Cooley. 
The work of John B. Minor in the University of Vir- 
ginia gave a well-deserved prominence to the Virginia 
School of Law. Theodore Dwight was once the Law 
School of Columbia College. Other law professors have 
added in no small degree to the prestige of Harvard, 
Cornell, and the University of Pennsylvania. In all 
these institutions a strenuous effort has been made to 
place the work in law on a basis not less high than that 
occupied by history and economics. In other words, 
in these and in some other institutions the law faculty 
is to be not an ''annex," but an integral part of the 
faculty of the university. When this is done, the 
requirements for graduation as a lawyer will not be less 



i6o LAJF SCHOOLS AND LAWYERS. 

than equivalent to the work for which a degree would 
be granted to a chemist or a civil engineer. 

To find the cause of any deficiency is to go a long 
way toward curing it. In this case, it seems to me, the 
remedy lies in placing the instruction in law on the same 
footing as that of other departments of the university. 
The teaching of law should be a life work in itself. The 
requirements and methods in law should be abreast of 
the best work in any department. The university atmo- 
sphere and the university ideals should surround the 
student in law as well as the student in history. No one 
should be encouraged to take professional studies until 
he is capable of carrying them on seriously and success- 
fully. 

There is, moreover, no reason for segregating the 
teachers of law in any way from the other members 
of the university faculty. As well make chemistry or 
economics a separate school, as to set off the law by 
itself. All these separations may be made in name, but 
they should not exist in fact. The elements of law have 
as strong claim to a place in general education as the 
elements of geometry or psychology. Even for purpose 
of professional education, it is better that the study of 
law should be carried on simultaneously with that of the 
historical and social sciences, which are its natural asso- 
ciates. The basis of law is in the nature of man, not 
in the statutes of the United States, nor in those of Eng- 
land. The common law has it source in man and his 
civilization, not in the books. This the student must 
learn to know and feel. So history, social science, and 
law must be mutually dependent on one another. The 
student of the one cannot be ignorant of the others. 



EDUCATE YOUR RULERS. i6i 

The suggestion that social studies should accompany- 
rather than precede law studies has lately received the 
strong advocacy of Dr. Woodrow Wilson and Professor 
Ernest W. Huffcut.* This association should give to 
the student not only a lawyer's training, but a scholar's 
horizon. Without this, broad views in jurisprudence 
and in politics are impossible. Such a course of study 
would give dignity to the general culture of the college. 
A student takes a better hold on culture studies where 
they are clearly related to the work of his life. 

Moreover, the politicians of each country are for the 
most part its lawyers. Our lawyers are our rulers, f We 

* Professor Huffcut says: "We may safely give our assent to the plan 
whereby the study of law is to be treated like the study of any other branch 
of human knowledge; that the preparation for it should be mainly the same 
as for the study of history and political science; and the law, upon the one 
hand, and history, political science, and philosophy, upon the other, will 
profit from the closer union between the two. I confess that this plan has for 
me personally many attractive features. It drives out at the outset the pro- 
fessional or technical atmosphere which is likely to surround the law when 
disconnected from other human interests. It brings the law school into the 
warmth and color and light of a general university atmosphere. It relates 
the subject of law logically and consistently to the general field of political 
science. The student from the outset of his studies in the field of law is 
encouraged, if not compelled, to make constant investigations in history, polit- 
ical science, and government, which cannot fail to give him a broader appre- 
hension of the true meaning and import of legal institutions and the admin- 
istration of justice. Our law schools are parts of a university system. By 
making them organic parts of such system, asking our colleagues of the uni- 
versities to recognize that our work is part and parcel of their own, and our- 
selves frankly recognizing that theirs is essential to the success of ours, we 
shall yet arrive at a solution of our problem which shall advance the interests 
of legal education and of sound learning." (Huffcut: Transactions Ameri- 
can Bar Association, Detroit, 1895.) 

fMr. James DeWitt Andrews says : " One might almost say that this was 
a government of the lawyers by the lawyers. Of the lawyers, because of the 
prominent, almost controlling, part they played in its institutions; by the law- 
yers, because of the important part they have taken in its administration. 
In every branch of government —legislative, executive, and judicial,— lawyers 
have always predominated ; but so well have they borne in mind the ethics of 
the profession, that their office, whether in the administration of justice or 



i62 LAW SCHOOLS AND LAWYERS, 

can never hope to see our State well governed till its 
lawyers are well trained. Our greatness has been in 
large degree the work of our great jurists. To know 
the law — not merely the statutes, or the tricks for evad- 
ing them, — makes men great. Of these we have had 
many, though scant our provision for their training has 
been. There can be no political conscience except as an 
outcome of political knowledge. Right acting can only 
come as a result of right thinking. The men who think 
right will, in the long run, act in accord with their 
knowledge. Those who have known that there is a 
science of human institutions can never wholly forget 
that fact. There can be no right thinking in matters of 
public administration without a knowledge of the laws 
of growth of human institutions. Only in accordance 
with these laws is good government possible. Of these 
fundamental laws of being the statutes of man must be 
an expression. Where they are not so the people have 
sooner or later a fearful score to pay. The Fates charge 
compound interest on every human blunder, and they 
have their own way at the last. 

when coupled with other public trusts, is but an agency and a trust, that their 
real supremacy has never been felt. Whoever impugns the integrity of the 
profession at large casts a slur on the nation." (Andrews: "The Works of 
James Wilson," Vol. I, preface.") 



X. 

THE PRACTICAL EDUCATION. 

A PRACTICAL education is one which can be made 
effective in life. We often abuse the word practi- 
cal by making it synonymous with temporary or super- 
ficial. It should mean just the opposite. An education 
which takes but little time and less effort, and leads at once 
to a paying situation, is not practical. It is not good, 
because it will never lead to anything better. An edu- 
cation which does not disclose the secret of power is 
unworthy the name. Nothing is really practical which 
does not provide for growth in effectiveness. There is 
nothing more practical than knowledge, nothing more 
unpractical than ignorance ; nothing more practical than 
sunshine, nothing less so than darkness. The chief 
essentials of education should be thoroughness and fit- 
ness. The most thorough training is the most practical, 
provided only that it is fitted to the end in view. The 
essential fault of educational systems of the past is that, 
in search for breadth and thoroughness, the element of 
fitness was forgotten. We have tried, as we used to say, 
to make well-rounded men, * ' men who stand four-square 
to every wind that blows." This is a training better 
fitted for hitching-posts or windmills than for men. This 
is the day of special knowledge. Only by doing some 
one thing better than any one else, can a man find a 
worthy place in our complex social fabric. The ability 

163 



i64 THE PRACTICAL EDUCATION. 

to do a hundred things in an inferior way will not help 
him. This is a fact our schools must recognize. No 
man is great by chance in these days. If one is to do 
anything of importance he must first understand what 
he is to do, and then set about it with all his might. 

Men of affairs often sneer at college men and college 
methods. Some of their criticisms are justified, others 
not. Such justification as they may have had is found 
in the lack of fitness in college training. Among condi- 
tions of life infinitely varied the college has decreed that 
all boys should take the same studies, in the same way, 
and at the same time, and that these studies should be 
the routine of the English boy of a century ago. In 
thus repeating the thoughts and learning of nations half 
forgotten, the minds of some ' ' Greek-minded ' ' and 
" Roman-minded" men were stimulated to their highest 
activity, and for them such training was good and ade- 
quate. 

But there were some, ''American-minded" perhaps, 
whose powers were not awakened by such influences. 
These came forth from the college walls into the life of 
the world, as Rip Van Winkle from the Catskills, dazed 
by the new experiences to which their studies had given 
no clue. 

I do not wish to depreciate the value of classical 
training. There is a higher point of view than that of 
mere utility, and the beautiful forms and noble thoughts 
of ancient literature have been a lifelong source of inspi- 
ration to thousands who have made no direct use of their 
college studies in the affairs of life. But there are other 
sources of inspiration which, in their way, may affect 
many to whom Latin or Greek would be a meaningless 



WORK THAT LASTS. 165 

grind. For such as these a different training is neces- 
sary, if our education is to be practical. The schools 
of the future will avoid not only bad training, but also 
"misfit" training; for the time of the student is so 
precious that no part of it should be wrongly used. 

The remedy for the evils of misfit training is not to 
discard the high standards or the thorough drill of the 
old college, but to apply it to a wider range of studies. 
No two students are ever quite alike, and no two will 
ever follow exactly the same career. If we work to the 
best advantage, no two will ever follow the same course 
of study. And thus recognizing in our efforts the 
infinite variations of human nature, the work of higher 
education acquires an effectiveness which it could never 
have under the cast-iron systems of the traditional col- 
lege. Misfit training is good only as compared with no 
training at all. Any sort of activity is better than stag- 
nation. 

The purpose of right training is to prepare for work 
which is to last. There is enough already of poor and 
careless work. Whatever is done needs to be done 
well. Let it be done honestly — not as to-day's make- 
shift, but as done for all time. 

High under the roof of the Cathedral of Cologne 
there is many an image carved in stone and wrought 
with the most exquisite care, but which human eye has 
never seen since it was first placed in the niche in which 
it stands. This work of the Gothic sculptors was done 
for the sight of God, and not for the worship of man. 
The Cathedral of Cologne was almost a thousand years 
in building. I saw, the other day, a cathedral in one 
of our Eastern cities, built in barely as many weeks as 



i66 THE PRACTICAL EDUCATION. 

the other in centuries. The marble sculptures on its 
lofty towers are made of sheet-iron, zinc-lined, and 
painted to represent stone. Such is the work of modern 
cathedral builders. But the slow-moving centuries will 
show the difference. 

A Swiss watchmaker said the other day: "Your 
American manufacturers cannot establish themselves in 
Europe. The first sample you send is all right, the 
second lot begins to drop off, the third destroys your 
reputation, and the fourth puts an end to your trade. 
All you seem to care for is to make money. What you 
want is some pride in your work." If this has been 
true of American watchmakers, it should be true no 
longer. The work that lasts must be not the quickest, 
but the best. Let it be done, not to require each year a 
fresh coat of paint, but done as if to last forever, and 
some of it will endure. This world is crowded on its 
lower floor, but higher up, for centuries to come, there 
will still remain a niche for each piece of honest work. 

** Profligacy," says Emerson, ** consists not in spend- 
ing, but in spending off the line of your career. The 
crime which bankrupts men and States is job work, 
declining from your main design to serve a turn here or 
there. Nothing is beneath you, if in the direction of 
your life; nothing, to you, is great or desirable, if it be 
off from that." 

The test of civilization is the saving of labor. The 
great economic waste of the world is that involved in 
unskilled labor. The gain of the nineteenth century 
over the eighteenth is the gain of skill in workmanship. 
But with all our progress in labor-saving, we have yet 
far to go before our use of labor shall balance our waste 



THE WASTE OF LABOR. 167 

of it. The work which goes to waste in Europe, even 
now, through lack of training and lack of proper tools, 
is greater than all the losses through wars and standing 
armies and the follies of hereditary caste. It is second 
only to the waste due to idleness itself. For idleness 
there is no remedy so effective as training. To know 
how to do is to have a pride and pleasure in doing. In 
the long run, there is no force making for virtue and 
sobriety so strong as the influence of skill. 

If a man knows how to do and how to act, he is 
assured against half the dangers which beset life. 
Training of the hand, training of the mind, training 
of any kind, which gives the man the power to do 
something which he knows to be genuine, gives him 
self-respect, makes a man of him, not a tool, or a force, 
or a thing. 

An unskilled laborer is a relic of past ages and condi- 
tions. He is a slave in a time when enforced slavery 
is past. The waste which comes from doing poor things 
in poor ways keeps half of humanity forever poor. What 
the unskilled man can do, a bucket of coal and a bucket 
of water, guided by *' a thimbleful of brains," will do more 
effectively. It is the mission of industrial training to put 
an end to unskilled labor; to make each workman a free 
man. When the time shall come when each workman 
can use his powers to the best advantage we shall have 
an end to the labor problem. The final answer of the labor 
problem is that each should solve it for himself. 

I have spoken of the training of the hand; but all 
training belongs to the brain, and all kinds of training 
are of like nature. The hand is the servant of the brain, 
and can receive nothing of itself. There is no such 



i68 THE PRACTICAL EDUCATION, 

thing as manual training as distinguished from training 
of the intellect. There is brain behind every act of the 
hand. The muscles are the mind's only servants. 
Whether we speak of training an orator, a statesman, 
or a merchant, or a mechanic, the same language must 
be used. The essential is that the means should lead 
toward the end to be reached. 

An ignorant man is a man who has fallen behind our 
civilization and cannot avail himself of his light. He finds 
himself in darkness, in an unknown land. He stumbles 
over trifling obstacles because he does not understand 
them. He cannot direct his course. The real dangers 
are all hidden, while the most innocent rock or bush 
seems a menacing giant. He is not master of the situ- 
ation. We have but one life to live; let that be an effect- 
ive one, not one that wastes at every turn through the 
loss of knowledge or lack of skill. What sunlight is 
to the eye education is to the intellect, and the most 
thorough education is always the most practical. No 
traveler is contented to go about with a lantern when 
he could as well have the sun. If he can have a com- 
pass and a map also, so much the better. But let his 
equipment be fitting. Let him not take an ax if there 
be no trees to chop, nor a boat unless he is to cross a 
river, nor a Latin grammar if he is to deal with bridge- 
building, unless the skill obtained by mastering the one 
gives him insight into the other. 

I often meet parents who wish to give their sons a prac- 
tical education. They think of practical as something 
cheap and easy. A little drawing, a little tinkering with 
machinery, a little bookkeeping of imaginary accounts, 
and their sons are * * ready for business. " * * Ready for 



EDUCATION FOR BUSINESS. 169 

business," as though the complex problems of finance 
were to be solved by a knowledge of bookkeeping by 
double-entry! Life is more serious than that. It takes 
a thorough education to make a successful business man. 
Not the education of the schools, we say, — and it may be 
so; but if so, it is the fault of the schools. They ought 
to make good business men as well as to make good men 
in any other profession. They ought to fit men for life. 
Why do the great majority of merchants fail? Is it not 
because they do not know how to succeed? Is it not 
because they have not the brains and the skill to com- 
pete with those who had both brains and training? Is 
it not because they do not realize that there are laws 
of finance and commerce as inexorable as the law of 
gravitation ? A man will stand erect because he stands 
in accord with the law of gravitation. A man or a nation 
will grow rich by working in accord with the laws which 
govern the accumulation of wealth. If there are such 
laws, men should know them. What men must know 
the schools can teach. 

The schools will indeed do a great work if they teach 
the existence of law. Half the people of America be- 
lieve this is a world of chance. Half of them believe 
they are victims of bad luck when they receive the re- 
wards of their own stupidity. Half of them believe that 
they are favorites of fortune, and will be helped out 
somehow, regardless of what they may do. Now and 
then some man catches a falling apple, picks up a penny 
from the dust, or a nugget from the gulch. Then his 
neighbors set to looking into the sky for apples, or into 
the dust for pennies, as though pennies and apples come 
in that way. Waiting for chances never made anybody 



I70 THE PRACTICAL EDUCATION. 

rich. The Golden Age of California began when gold 
no longer came by chance. There is more gold in the 
black adobe of the Santa Clara Valley than existed in 
the whole great range of the Sierras until men sought 
for it, not by luck or chance, but by system and science. 
Whatever is worth having comes because we have earned 
it. There is but one way to earn anything — that is to 
find out the laws which govern production, and to shape 
our actions in accordance with these laws. Good luck 
never comes to the capable man as a surprise. He is 
prepared for it, because it was the very thing he has 
a right to expect Sooner or later, and after many hard 
raps, every man who lives long enough will find this 
out. When he does so, he has the key to success, 
though it may be too late to use it. 

It is the work of the school to give these laws reality 
in the mind of the student. The school can bring the 
student face to face with these laws, and even teach him 
to make them do his bidding. If we work with them, 
these laws are as tractable as the placid flow of a mighty 
river. If we struggle against them, they make the ter- 
rible havoc of an uncontrolled flood. To ignore them 
is to defy them. From our knowledge of the laws of na- 
ture arise the achievements of civilization. These are our 
knowledge wrought into action. The thing we under- 
stand becomes our servant. Whatever we know we can 
h ive. But whatever we conquer, our victory is a tri- 
umph of knowledge. 

We speak of this age as the age of inventions, the age 
of man's conquest of the forces of nature. But the man 
who invents or constructs machinery is not the conqueror. 
It is easy for one to harness the lightning when another 



PURE SCIENCE BEFORE APPLIED SCIENCE. 171 

has shown him the lightning's nature and ways. It is 
easier still to repeat what others have done. The appli- 
cations of science are only an incident in the growth of 
science. The electric light and the locomotive follow 
sooner or later, as a matter of course, when we have found 
the laws which govern electric currents and the expansive 
power of steam. It is this knowledge which gives con- 
trol over the forces of nature. It is by investigation, not 
through application or repetition, that man's power ad- 
vances. It is the investigator who comes in contact with 
the unveiled ways of God. The applications of elec- 
tricity to common purposes have been for the most part 
made in our day, but the knowledge on which they are 
based goes back to the earliest investigators of physical 
laws. These men forced their way into the infinite dark- 
ness, regardless of the multitude that would crowd into 
their path. An investigator is the cause of a thousand 
inventors. A Faraday or a Helmholtz is the parent of a 
thousand Edisons. Without the help of the university 
Edisons are possible. Only the highest training can 
make a Helmholtz; for no man can reach the highest 
rank who has not entered into all the work of all his 
predecessors. 

And this brings me to say that the great work of a 
university is to be the center of investigation. It should 
be the source of new truths — of new conquests in every 
field. To it will come for the brief course of training 
and guidance many who, in the maturity of their lives, 
will accomplish much good for their fellow-men. In the 
ever-increasing circle of human knowledge new fields are 
being constantly opened. The whole knowledge of the 
last generation must be taken for granted as the basis of 



172 THE PRACTICAL EDUCATION. 

advancement for the next. Not till the circle of human 
knowledge has widened to infinity, shall we comprehend 
the infinite goodness of God. 



XL 

SCIENCE IN THE HIGH SCHOOL.* 

THE purpose of science-teaching as a part of general 
education is this — to train the judgment through 
its exercise on first-hand knowledge. The student of 
science is taught to know what he knows and to dis- 
tinguish it from what he merely remembers or imagines. 
Our contact with the universe is the source of all our 
knowledge. This knowledge tested and set in order we 
call science. Throughout the ages, the growth of the 
human mind has been in direct proportion to the breadth 
of this contact. To the man without knowledge of 
science, the universe seems small. Science is our per- 
ception of realities; and as the realities come, year by 
year, to occupy a larger and larger place in our life, so 
the demand for more and better training in science will 
long be an urgent and growing one. But science should 
hold its place in the schools by virtue of its power as an 
agent in mental training, not because of the special use- 
fulness of scientific facts, nor because knowledge of 
things has a higher market value than the knowledge 
of words. 

The time will come when the study of the objects and 
forces of nature will be as much a matter of course in all 
our schools as the study of numbers, but the science- 
work of the next century will not be the work we are 

•Address before the Indiana State Teachers' Association, December 26, 
1889 ; published in the Popular Science Monthly, April, 1890, 

173 



174 SCIENCE IN THE HIGH SCHOOL, 

doing now. The science in our schools is too often a 
make-beHeve, and the schools gain with every make- 
believe that slips out of the curriculum. Deeply as I 
am interested in the progress of science, both in school 
and out, with Professor Huxley, * ' I would not turn my 
hand over ' ' to have biology taught in every school in 
the land, if the subject be taught through books only. 
To pretend to do, without doing, is worse than not to 
pretend. The conventional * * fourteen weeks ' ' in science 
gives no contact with nature, no training of any sort, no 
information worth having; only a distaste for that class 
of scattering information which is supposed to be science. 

There is a charm in real knowledge which every stu- 
dent feels. The magnet attracts iron, to be sure, to the 
student who has learned the fact from a book; but the 
fact is real only to the student who has himself felt it 
pull. It is more than this — it is enchanting to the 
student who has discovered the fact for himself. To 
read a statement of the fact gives knowledge, more or 
less complete, as the book is accurate or the memory 
retentive. To verify the fact gives training; to discover 
it gives inspiration. Training and inspiration, npt the 
facts themselves, are the justification of science-teaching. 
Facts enough we can gather later in life, when we are 
too old to be trained or inspired. He whose knowledge 
comes from authority, or is derived from books alone, 
has no notion of the force of an idea brought first-hand 
from human experience. 

What is true of one science is true of all in greater or 
less degree. I may take the science of zoology for my 
illustration, simply because it is the one nearest my 
hand. In very few of our high schools has the instruc- 



SMATTERING AS SCIENCE. 175 

tion in zoology any value. For this unfortunate fact 
there are several causes, and some of these are beyond 
the control of the teachers. In the first place, the high- 
school course is overloaded, and the small part of the 
course given to the sciences is divided among too many 
of them. A smattering of one science is of little use, 
either for discipline or information. A smattering of 
many sciences may be even worse, because it leads the 
mind to be content with smattering. Indeed, so greatly 
have our schools sinned in this respect that many writers 
on education seem to regard science as synonymous with 
smattering, and they contrast it with other branches 
of learning which are supposed to have some standard 
of thoroughness. Most of our colleges have, at one 
time or other, arranged courses of study not approved 
by the faculty, in response to the popular demand for 
many studies in a little time. Such a course of odds 
and ends is always called ' * the scientific course, ' ' and 
it leads to the appropriate degree of "B. S.," — Bache- 
lor of Surfaces. 

The high school can do some things very well, but it 
will fail if it try to do too much. Unfortunately, the 
present tendency in our high schools is in the direction of 
such failure — to do many things poorly, rather than a few 
things well. In other words, we try to satisfy the public 
by a show of teaching those subjects which we do not 
really teach. In the sciences we study books instead 
of nature, because books are plenty and cheap, and can 
be finished quickly, while Nature herself is accessible 
only to those who want something of her. The high 
school would do well not to attempt to give a general 
view of science. It is better to select some two or three 



176 SCIENCE IN THE HIGH SCHOOL. 

of the number — a physical and a biological science, per- 
haps, — and to spend the available time on these. The 
choice should depend mainly on the interest or the skill 
of the teacher. Teach those sciences that you can teach 
best. 

President Hill, of Rochester, has well said : *' Thou- 
sands of our youth have studied chemistry without ever 
seeing an experiment, physics without seeing an air-pump, 
and astronomy without ever looking through a telescope. 
A professor of the ancient type maintained that this is a 
great advantage, like the study of geometry without 
figures, because it stimulates the imagination. It is an 
invigoration of stupidity and conceit, sealing the mind to 
reality by substituting subjective fancies for experimental 
proofs, and the pretense of knowing for clear ideas. Its 
effect upon the morals is as pernicious as its effect upon 
the mind; for it weakens the reverence for truth and 
engenders the habit of mental trifling." 

One of our wisest writers on education excludes sci- 
ence-teaching (by which he means giving information 
about scientific subjects) from the fundamental require- 
ments of education, because the knowledge of nature is 
not one of the " five windows " through which the soul 
looks .out on life. These windows, according to this 
author, are reading and writing, grammar, arithmetic, 
geography, and history. The simile is a happy one. 
The soul, confined in the watch-tower of medieval educa- 
tion, looks out on the world through these five windows 
— and they are but windows, for they give no contact 
with the things themselves. The study of nature throws 
wide open the doors, and lets the soul out to the fields 
and woods. It brings that contact with God through 



GOOD AND BAD TEACHERS. 177 

His works which has been, tnrough all the ages, the 
inspiration of the poets and the prophets, as well as of 
those long-despised apostles of truth whom we call men 
of science. 

A second difficulty is this : Our towns will not pay for 
teachers enough to do the work as it should be done, and 
of the few teachers we have the people make no demand 
for thorough preparation. Very few of them are broadly 
educated or have had any scientific training whatever. 
And such teachers are expected to teach a dozen sub- 
jects each, and therefore have no time to make good 
their defective preparation. Thus good teaching of sci- 
ence cannot be expected, for streams do not rise higher 
than their sources. The only remedy for these condi- 
tions seems to lie in the gradual education of the people. 
A series of object-lessons, showing the difference between 
a good teacher and a poor one, is the most effective 
means of causing good work to be appreciated. 

But, taking things as they are, even with uneducated 
teachers and teachers crowded for time, fairly good work 
may be done by the use of good methods. A great deal 
will depend, not on the kind of books you use, but on 
the kind of books you avoid. Most of the current text- 
books of elementary zoology are simply pernicious so far 
as your purposes are concerned. Even if these books were 
well digested and accurate in their statements of fact, 
which is rarely the case, they are based on incorrect prin- 
ciples. They are not elementary but fragmentary in their 
character. It is a great mistake to suppose that because 
a book is small and says very little about each one of the 
animals of which it treats, it is thereby rendered elemen- 
tary. Fragments are not necessarily elements. A frag- 

M 



178 SCIENCE IN THE HIGH SCHOOL. 

ment of rock is as hard to digest as a bowlder. Ele- 
mentary work in science should treat of but few things, 
but the impressions it leaves with the child should be 
very clear ones. The ideas derived from the common 
text-books are of the vaguest possible character. These 
books are the parasites, not the allies, of science. They 
bear the same relation to the progress of science that 
barnacles bear to the progress of a ship. If you keep 
clear of these, you cannot go far astray. Let us recall 
the words of Agassiz to the publisher who tried to induce 
him to write a school-book on zoology: 

" I told him," he said, *' that I was not the man to do 
that sort of thing; and I told him, too, that the less of 
that sort of thing which is done the better. It is not 
school-books we want, but students. The book of na- 
ture is always open, and all I can do or say shall be to 
lead students to study that book, and not to pin their 
faith to any other. ' ' And at another time he said, * ' If 
we study Nature in books, when we go out of doors we 
cannot find her." 

The essential of method is that we allow nothing to 
come between the student and the object which he stu- 
dies. The book, or chart, or lecture which can be used 
in place of the real thing is the thing you should never 
use. Your students should see for themselves, and draw 
their own conclusions from what they see. When they 
have a groundwork of their own observations, other 
facts can be made known to them as a basis for advanced 
generalizations, for the right use of books is as impor- 
tant as their misuse is pernicious; but work of this sort 
belongs to the university rather than to the high school. 
You do not wish to have your students tell you from 



WHAT THE FROG CAN TELL YOU. 179 

memory the characters of the Sauropsida as distinguished 
from the Ichthyopsida. What you want is the answer to 
their own questionings of the frog and the turtle. 

I was lately present at a high-school examination in 
zoology. The teacher gave a number of the stock ques- 
tions, such as "Describe the Gasteropoda," *'What 
are the chief diiferences between the domestic turkey 
and the turkey of Honduras?" *'How do Asiatic and 
African elephants differ?" "On which foot of the 
ornithorhynchus does the webbing extend past the 
toes?" and so on. At last he said: *' I will now give 
you a practical question: A few days ago we had a frog 
in the class, and all of you saw it; now write out all the 
characteristics of the sub-kingdom, class, and order to 
which the frog belongs." 

This is all useless. The definitions of these classes 
and orders do not concern the child. To the working 
naturalist, these names are as essential as the names of 
the stations on the road to a railway engineer. They 
belong to his business, but the names and distances of 
railway stations do not form part of any good work in 
primary geography. You do not need to teach your 
students that vertebrates are divided into mammals, 
birds, reptiles, batrachians, and fishes. It is not true in 
the first place, and, if it were, it is not relevant to them. 
Stick to your fi'og, if you are studying frogs, and he 
will teach you more of the science of animals than can 
be learned from all the memorized classifications that 
you can bracket out on a hundred rods of blackboard! 

The prime defect in our schools is not, after all, that 
the teachers do not know the subjects they teach, but 
that they do not know nor care for the purpose of their 



i8o SCIENCE IN THE HIGH SCHOOL. 

teaching. In other words, they do not know how to 
teach. The book is placed in their hands by the school 
board, and they teach by the book. If the book comes 
to them wrong-side up, their teaching is forever inverted. 
That this is true, the statistics gathered recently from the 
high schools of Indiana, by Dr. Barton W. Evermann, 
very clearly show. It is no wonder that a superintend- 
ent is needed for every dozen teachers. A good teacher 
should know the end for which he works, and then he 
can adapt his means to fit this end. 

I once visited a large high school, one of the best in 
the country, with a science- teacher whose studies have 
won him the respect of his fellow-workers. But for some 
reason, on that day at least, he failed to bring himself 
into the classroom. I heard him quizzing a class of boys 
and girls on animals — not on the animals of the woods 
and fields, not on the animals before them, for there 
were none, but on the edentates of South America. An 
especial point was to find out whether it is the nine- 
banded armadillo (novemcincius) or the three-banded 
armadillo (tricinctus) which does not dig a hole in the 
ground for its nest. The book, written by a man who 
did not know an armadillo from a m.ud-turtle, gives this 
piece of information. It was in the lesson, and the stu- 
dents must get it. And on this and like subjects these 
boys and girls were wasting their precious time — 
precious, because if they do not learn to observe in 
their youth, they will never learn, and the horizon of 
their lives will be always narrower and darker than it 
should have been. Already the work of that day is a 
blank. They have forgotten the nine-banded armadillo 
and the three-banded, and so has their teacher, and so 



THE METHODS OF NON-SCIENCE. i8i 

have I. All that remains with them is a mild hatred of 
the armadillo and of the edentates in general, and a 
feeling of relief at being no longer under their baleful 
influence. But with this usually goes the determination 
never to study zoology again. And when these students 
later come to the college, they know no more of science 
and its methods than they did when in babyhood they 
first cried for the moon. 

Darwin tells us that his early instruction in geology was 
so "incredibly dull" that he came to the determination, 
afterward happily changed, * * never so long as he lived 
to read a book on geology or in any way to study the 
subject." 

I once had a student, well trained in the conventional 
methods of non-science, who was set to observe the 
yeast-plant under the microscope. He had read what 
the books say about yeast, and had looked at the pic- 
tures. So he went to work vigorously. In a short time 
he had found out all about the little plant, and had made 
a series of drawings which showed it very nicely. By 
and by some one noticed that he was working without 
any object-glass in his microscope. He had not seen the 
yeast-plant at all, only the dust on the eye-piece. This 
is the vital fault of much of our teaching of elementary 
science. It is not real; it is not the study of nature, only 
of the dust-heaps of old definitions. 

Yet nothing is easier than to do fairly good teaching, 
even without special knowledge or special appliances. 
Bring out your specimens and set them before the boys 
and girls. They will do the work, and do it eagerly; 
and they will furnish the specimens, too. There is no 
difficulty about materials. Our New World is the ** El 



i82 SCIENCE IN THE HIGH SCHOOL. 

Dorado" of the naturalists of Europe. You can get 
material for a week's work by turning over a single 
rotten log. I once heard Professor Agassiz say to an 
assembly of teachers, and I quote from him the more 
freely because he gave his life to the task of the introduce 
tion of right methods into American schools: 

"Select such subjects that your students can not >valk 
out without seeing them. If you can find nothing better, 
take a house-fly or a cricket, and let each one hold a 
specimen while you speak. . . . There is no part 
of the country where, in the summer, you cannot get a 
sufficient supply of the best of specimens. Teach your 
pupils to bring them in. Take your text from the brooks 
and not from the booksellers. . . . It is better to 
have a few forms well studied than to teach a little about 
many hundred species. Better a dozen forms thoroughly 
known as the result of the first year's work, than to have 
two thousand dollars' worth of shells and corals bought 
from a curiosity-store. The dozen animals will be your 
own. . . . You will find the same elements of 
instruction all about you wherever you are teaching. You 
can take your classes out and give them the same lessons, 
and lead them up to the same subjects in one place as 
another. And this method of teaching children is so 
natural, so suggestive, so true. That is the charm of 
teaching from Nature. No one can warp her to suit his 
own views. She brings us back to absolute truth so 
often as we wander." 



XII. 
SCIENCE AND THE COLLEGES.* 

WE have come together to-day to do our part in 
raising one of the milestones which mark the pro- 
gress of education in America. Our interest in higher 
education and our interest in science bring us here. 
More than ever before in the history of humanity we find 
these interests closely associated. More and more each 
year the higher education of America is taking the char- 
acter of science ; and in the extension of human knowl- 
edge, the American university now finds its best excuse 
for being. 

I hope that in what I shall have to say I shall not be 
accused of undue glorification of science. I recognize 
in the fullest degree the value of all agencies in the de- 
velopment of the human mind. But the other depart- 
ments of learning may each have its turn. We are here 
to-day to dedicate a hall of science. We are here in 
the interest of science-teaching and scientific research. 
When, in a few years to come, we may dedicate a hall 
of letters, we shall sing the praises of poetry and litera- 
ture. But to-day we speak of science, in the full cer- 
tainty that the humanities will not suffer with its growth. 
All real knowledge is a help to all other, and all real 
love of beauty must rest on love of truth. 

At this time, as we stand together, by the side of the 

♦Address at the dedication of the Science Hall of the University of Illi- 
nois, November i6, 1892; from the Popular Science Monthly for April, 1893. 

183 



i84 SCIENCE AND THE COLLEGES. 

milestone we have set up, on the breezy upland which 
marks the boundary of our nineteenth century, it is 
worth while for a moment to glance back over the de- 
pressing lowlands from which we have risen. And in 
our discussion of the relations of the American college 
to science, we find depression and darkness enough with- 
out going back very far. 

I am still numbered, I trust, with the young men. I 
am sure that I have never yet heard the word ''old" 
seriously joined to my name. When men speak of * ' Old 
Jordan," I know that they mean the river of Palestine, 
and not me. Yet, in the few years during which I have 
taught zoology, the relation of science to education has 
undergone most remarkable changes. 

I remember very clearly that twenty years ago, when, 
in such way as I could, I had prepared myself for the 
two professions of naturalist and college professor, I found 
that these professions were in no way related. I remem- 
ber having in 1872 put the results of my observations 
into these words : '* The colleges have no part or interest 
in the progress of science, and science has no interest 
in the growth of the colleges." 

The college course in those days led into no free air. 
A priori and ex cathedra^ two of its favorite phrases, 
described it exactly. Its essentials were the grammar 
of dead languages, and the memorized results of the 
applications of logic to number and space. Grammar 
and logic were taught in a perfunctory way, and the 
student exhausted every device known to restless boys in 
his desire to evade the instruction he had spent his time 
and money to obtain. Then, when all the drill was over, 
and the long struggle between perfunctory teachers and 



HOW SCIENCE INVADED THE COLLEGE. 185 

unwilling boys had dragged to an end, the students were 
passed on to the president, to receive from him an expo- 
sition of philosophy. This was the outlook on life for 
which three years of drill made preparation. And this 
philosophy was never the outgrowth of the knowledge 
of the day, but simply the debj'is of outworn speculations 
of the middle ages. It bore no relations to modern life or 
modern thought. It was therefore peculiarly safe and 
tranquilizing. 

Let us recall the first invasion of science in the conven- 
tional programmes of study. It came in response to an 
outside demand for subjects interesting and practical. It 
was met in such a way as to silence, rather than to sat- 
isfy, the demand. A few trifling courses, memorized 
from antiquated text-books, and the work in science was 
finished. The teachers who were capable of higher 
things had no opportunity to make use of their powers. 
Their investigations were not part of their duties. They 
were carried on in time stolen from their tasks of plod- 
ding and prodding. It is to the shame of the State of 
Indiana that she kept one of the greatest astronomers 
of our time for forty years teaching boys the elements of 
geometry and algebra. That he should have taught 
astronomy, and made astronomers, occurred to no one 
in authority until Daniel Kirkwood was seventy years 
old, and by the laws of nature could teach no longer. 
What was true in this case was true in scores of others. 
The investigator had no part in the college system, or if 
on sufferance he found a place, his time was devoted to 
anything else rather than to the promotion of science. 
Everywhere in Europe and America were men who were 
devoting their lives eagerly to scientific research; but, in 



i86 SCIENCE AND THE COLLEGES. 

nine cases out of ten, these men were outside of the col- 
leges. Even with the others, very few had any opportu- 
nity to teach those subjects in which the interest was 
deepest. 

The American college of the middle of this century, 
like its English original, existed for the work of the 
church. *' If the college dies the church dies," was the 
basis of its appeal for money and influence. Its duty was 
to form a class of educated men in whose hands should 
lie the preservation of the creed. In the mouths of igno- 
rant men the truths of the church would be clouded. 
Each wise church would see that its wisdom be not 
marred by human folly. The needs of one church 
indicated the needs of others. So it came about that 
each of the many organizations called churches in Amer- 
ica established its colleges here and there about the coun- 
try, all based on the same general plan. 

And, as the little towns on the rivers and prairies grew 
with the progress of the country into large cities, so it 
was thought, by some mysterious virtue of inward expan- 
sion, these little schools in time would grow to be great 
universities. And in this optimistic spirit the future was 
forestalled, and the schools were called universities from 
the beginning. As time went on, it appeared that a uni- 
versity could not be made without money, and the source 
of money must be outside the schools. And so has 
ensued a long struggle between the American college 
and the wolf at the door — a tedious, belittling conflict, 
which has done much to lower the name and dignity of 
higher education. To this educational planting without 
watering, repeated again and again, East and West, 
North and South, must be ascribed the unnaturally severe 



''THE FRESH-WATER COLLEGE:' 187 

struggle for existence through which our colleges have 
been forced to pass, the poor work, low salaries, and 
humiliating economies of the American college professor, 
the natural end of whom, according to Dr. Holmes, is 
*' starvation.'* 

The intense rivalry among these schools, like rivalry 
among half-starving tradesmen, has done much to belittle 
the cause in which all are engaged. At the same time, 
their combined rivalry has too often prevented the growth 
within their neighborhood of any better school. 

In this connection, you may pardon me for a word of 
my own experience, when twenty years ago (1872) I set 
out in search of a place for work. A chair of natural his- 
tory was the height of my aspirations; for anything more 
specialized than this it seemed useless to hope. I was early 
called from New York to such a chair, in a well-known 
college of Illinois. But in those days, the work attached 
to a college chair was never limited by its title. As pro- 
fessor of natural history, I taught zoology, botany, geol- 
ogy, physiology — a little of each, and to little purpose. 
Then physics, chemistry, mineralogy, natural theology, 
and political economy, also, as a matter of course. With 
these went German, Spanish, and evidences of Christi- 
anity, because there was no one else to take them. 
There finally fell on me the Hterary work of the college — 
the orations, essays, declamations, and all that flavorless 
foolishness on which the college depended for a creditable 
display at commencement. When to this was added a 
class in the Sunday-school, you will see why it seemed 
necessary that the naturalist and the professor must 
sooner or later part company. I tried at one time to 
establish a little laboratory in chemistry, but met with a 



i88 SCIENCE AND THE COLLEGES. 

sharp rebuke from the board of trustees, who directed 
me to keep the students out of what was called the * ' cab- 
inet," for they were likely to injure the apparatus and 
waste the chemicals. 

When I left this college and looked elsewhere for work, 
I found on all sides difficulty and disappointment; for the 
reputation I had, wholly undeserved, I am sorry to say, 
was the dreaded reputation of a specialist. 

The question of conventional orthodoxy seemed every- 
where to be made one of primary importance, and candi- 
dates for chairs who, like myself, were not heretics on 
the subject of the origin of species, passed the rock of 
evolution, only to be stranded on the inner shoals of the 
mysteries of the Scottish philosophy. 

But these were not the only sources of difficulty. In 
one institution toward which I had looked, the chair of 
natural history was found unnecessary. In the meeting 
of the board of trustees, a member arose and said, in sub- 
stance: "We have just elected a professor of history. 
This includes all history, and the work in natural history 
is a part of it. Let the professor in history take this 
too." And for that year, at least, the professor of his- 
tory took it all, and it was not hard for him to do this, 
because the work in history was the cutting of straw. 
He read a chapter in a text-book in advance of the stu- 
dents. This was no heavy drain on either his time or his 
intellect. Even in the excellent State university into 
which I ultimately drifted, I was met at the beginning by 
the caution that the purpose of my work must be ele- 
mentary teaching, the statement of the essential facts of 
science, and by no means the making of naturalists or 
of specialists. 



AGASSIZ AS A UNIVERSITY. 189 

I could give more illustrations, and from better institu- 
tions, showing that the demand of the colleges of twenty- 
years ago was a demand for docility and versatility, 
rather than for thoroughness or originality; that, as a 
rule, the progress of science in America came from men 
outside of the college, and in a great part outside of col- 
lege training and college sympathies; that to promote 
science or to extend knowledge was not often one of the 
college ideals; and that the college's chief function was to 
keep old ideas unchanged. What was safe in times of old 
will be safe to-day, and safety, rather than inspiration or 
investigation, was the purpose of the college. From time 
immemorial until now, Oxford and Cambridge, the 
schools of clergymen and gentlemen, have been the cen- 
ter of English conservatism. The American colleges — 
dilute copies of Oxford and Cambridge — came nearest 
their models in their retention of old methods and old 
ideas. The motto, once suggested for a scientific 
museum, *'We will keep what we have got," might 
have been taken by the American college. There was 
no American university then, unless a few broad-minded 
teachers — mostly in Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Mich- 
igan — could, as so many individuals, be properly 
regarded as such. 

The coming of Agassiz to America may be said to 
mark the foundation of the first American university. 
Agassiz was the university. The essential character of 
the university is Lernfreiheity freedom of learning, the 
freedom of the student to pursue his studies to the limit 
of the known, the freedom of encouragement to invade 
the realm of the unknown. It is from this realm that 
come the chief rewards of the scholar. The school from 



I90 SCIENCE AND THE COLLEGES. 

which no exploring parties set out has no right to the 
name of university. In the progress of science, and the 
application of its methods to subjects not formerly con- 
sidered scientific, the German university has its growth 
and development. In like progress must arise the Amer- 
ican university. 

You remember the story of the discussion, some forty 
years ago, between Emerson and Agassiz, as to the 
future of Harvard. Emerson, himself one of the sanest 
and broadest of men, saw in the work of Agassiz ele- 
ments of danger, whereby the time-honored symmetry 
of Harvard might be destroyed. In a lecture on univer- 
sities, in Boston, Emerson made some such statement as 
this: That natural history was ** getting too great an 
ascendency at Harvard ' ' ; that it * * was out of proportion 
to other departments, * and hinted ^ that a check-rein 
would not be amiss on the enthusiastic young professor 
who is responsible for this." 

'* Do you not see," Agassiz wrote to Emerson, "that 
the way to bring about a well-proportioned development 
of all the resources of the university is not to check the 
natural history department, but to stimulate all the 
others ? Not that the zoological school grows too fast, 
but that the others do not grow fast enough? This 
sounds invidious and perhaps somewhat boastful; but it 
is you," he said, **and not I, who have instituted the 
comparison. It strikes me that you have not hit upon 
the best remedy for this want of balance. If symmetry 
is to be obtained by cutting down the most vigorous 
growth, it seems to me it would be better to have a 
little irregularity here and there. In stimulating, by 
every means in my power, the growth of the museum 



MODERN UNIVERSITY PROGRESS. 191 

and the means of education connected with it, I am far 
from having a selfish wish to see my own department 
tower above the others. I wish that every one of my 
colleagues would make it hard for me to keep up with 
him; and there are some among them, I am happy to 
say, who are ready to run a race with me." 

In these words of Agassiz may be seen the key-note 
of modern university progress. The university should 
be the great refuge-hut on the ultimate boundaries of 
knowledge, from which, daily and weekly, adventurous 
bands set out on voyages of discovery. It should be 
the Upernavik from which Polar travelers draw their 
supplies, and as the shoreless sea of the unknown meets 
us on every side, the same house of refuge and supply 
will serve for a thousand different exploring parties, 
moving out in every direction into the infinite ocean. 
This is the university ideal of the future. Some day it 
will be felt as a loss and a crime if any one who could be 
an explorer is forced to become anything else. And 
even then, after countless ages of education and scien- 
tific progress, the true university will still stand on the 
boundaries, it walls still washed by the same unending 
sea, the boundless bcean of possible human knowledge. 

The new growth of the American university which we 
honor to-day is simply its extension and its freedom, 
so that a scholar can find place within its walls. The 
scholar cannot breathe in confined air. The walls of 
medievalism have been taken down. The winds of free- 
dom are blowing, and the summer sunshine of to-day 
quickens the pulse of the scholar in the deepest clois- 
ter. In the university of the future, all departments of 
human knowledge, all laws of the omnipresent God will 



192 SCIENCE AND THE COLLEGES. 

be equally cherished because equally sacred. The place 
of science in education will then be the place it deserves 
— nothing more, nothing less. 

Many influences have combined to bring about the 
emancipation of the American college. Not the least 
of these is the growth of the State university as an insti- 
tution, existing for all the people, and for no end except 
the purpose of popular instruction. It is a part of the 
great training-school in civics, morals, and economics 
which we call universal suffrage. 

Most of these schools have celebrated their coming of 
age within the last five years, and their growth is cer- 
tainly one of the most notable features in the intellectual 
development of America. The State university was 
founded as a logical result of the American system of 
education. It was part of the graded system through 
which the student was to rise, step by step, from the 
township school to the State university. It has grown 
because it deserved to grow. When it has deserved 
nothing, it has received nothing. In the persistence of 
old methods and low ideals we find the reason for 
the slow growth of some of the State universities. In 
the early dropping of shackles and the loyalty to its 
own freedom we find the cause of the rapid growth of 
others. 

In its early years the State university was in aim and 
method almost a duplicate of the denominational schools 
by which it was surrounded. Its traditions were the 
same, its professors drawn from the same source; its 
presidents were often the defeated candidates for presi- 
dencies of the denominational schools. Men not popular 
enough for church preferment would do for the headship 



DIVISION OF EDUCATIONAL SPOILS. 193 

of the State universities. The salaries paid were very- 
small, the patronage was local, and the professors were 
often chosen at the dictates of some local leader, or to 
meet some real or supposed local demand. I can remem- 
ber one case when the country was searched to find for a 
State university a professor of history who should be a 
Democrat and a Methodist. All questions of fitness 
were subordinated to this one of restoring the lost sym- 
metry of a school in which Presbyterians, Baptists, and 
Republicans had more than their share of the spoils. 
This idea of division of spoils in schools, as in politics, is 
only a shade less baleful than the still older one of taking 
all spoils without division. And when the spoils system 
was finally ignored, and in the State universities men 
were chosen with reference to their character, scholar- 
ship, and ability to teach, regardless of ' ' other marks or 
brands ' ' upon them, the position of professor was made 
dignified and worthy. 

The first important step in the advance of the State 
universities came through the growth of individualism in 
education — that is, through the advent of the elective 
system, — and its first phase was the permission to substi- 
tute advanced work in science for elementary work in 
something else. It does not matter from what source the 
idea of individual choice in education has arisen. It may 
be a gift from far-seeing Harvard to her younger sisters; 
or it may be that in Harvard, as elsewhere, the elective 
system has arisen from a study of the actual conditions. 
The educational ideas which are now held by the major- 
ity of teachers in our larger schools were long ago the 
views of the overruled minority; and for fifty years or 
more individuals in the minority have looked forward to 



194 SCIENCE AND THE COLLEGES. 

the time when inspiration, and not drill, would be the aim 
of the colleges. 

Agassiz said, in 1864, in advocating the elective sys- 
tem, that although it might possibly give the pretext for 
easy evasion of duty to some inefficient or lazy students, 
it gave larger opportunities to the better class, and the 
university should adapt itself to the latter, rather than 
to the former. * ' The bright students, ' ' he said, ' ' are 
now deprived of the best advantages to be had, because 
the dull or the indifferent must be treated like children. ' ' 

In the same year, Emerson spoke of the old grudge he 
had for forty-five years owed Harvard College, for the 
cruel waste of two years of college time on mathematics, 
without any attempt to adapt the tasks to the capacity of 
learners. ' * I still remember, ' ' he said, ' ' the useless 
pains I took, and my serious recourse to my tutor for 
aid he did not know how to give me. And now I see 
to-day the same indiscriminate imposing of mathematics 
on all students during two years. Ear, or no ear, you 
shall all learn music, to the waste of the time and health 
of a large part of the class. ' ' 

I remember well the beginning of the modern system 
in the university of a neighboring State. It came as the 
permission, carefully guarded, to certain students, who 
had creditably passed the examination of the Freshman 
year in Latin, to take, instead of the Sophomore Latin, 
some advanced work in zoology. To the very great 
surprise of the professor of Latin, those who availed them- 
selves of this opportunity ' ' to take something easy ' ' 
were not the worst students in Latin, but the best. 
Those who were attracted by investigation chose the 
new road; the plodders and shirks were contented with 



GROWTH OF SCIENCE COURSES. 195 

the evils they had, rather than to fly to others that they 
knew not of. And so, Httle by Httle, in that institu- 
tion, and in all the others, has come about a relaxation 
of the chains of the curriculum of Oxford and Cambridge, 
and the extension of opportunities for students to find out 
the facts of nature for themselves, rather than to rest 
with the conserved wisdom of an incurious past. 

Thus slowly and painfully came about the development 
of the scientific courses. We can all remember the 
dreary time when in the tedious faculty meetings we 
used to devise scientific courses, short in time and weak 
in quality, for students who could not, or would not, 
learn Latin and Greek. There was no scientific prepara- 
tion or achievement required in these courses. They were 
scientific only in the sense that they were not anything 
else. Their degree of Bachelor of Science was regarded, 
and rightly, as far inferior to the time-honored B. A. In 
the inner circle of education it was regarded as no degree 
at all, and its existence was a concession to the utilitarian 
spirit of a non-scholastic age. The scientific course was, 
indeed, inferior; for it lacked substance. There was no 
lime in its vertebrae. The central axis of Greek had 
been taken out, and no corresponding piece of solid 
work put in its place. Gradually, however, even this 
despised degree has risen to a place with the others. 
Slowly and grudgingly the colleges have admitted that 
under some circumstances the study of science might be 
as worthy of recognition as the study of Greek. When 
science was worthily studied, this proposition became 
easy of acceptance. In our best colleges to-day the study 
of science stands side by side with the study of language, 
and the one counts equally with the other, even for the 



196 SCIENCE AND THE COLLEGES. 

degree of Bachelor of Arts. For not the Greek itself, 
but the culture it implies, was the glory of the course of 
arts. When equal culture and equal work come through 
other channels, they are worthy of this degree. To deny 
this, would be to make of the degree itself a mere child's 
toy, a play on words. As a matter of fact, it can be 
little more, and sooner or later the college will have no 
need for degrees. Science has shown herself a worthy 
suitor of the highest degree the university can give. She 
will show herself strong enough to care for no degrees at 
all. In the great schools of the future, each study shall 
become its own reward. Let all come who will, and let 
each take what he can, and let the ideals be so high that 
no one will imagine that he is getting when he is not. 

Not the least of the aids to freedom in science was the 
Morrill Act, under which a certain part of the public 
lands was given for the foundation of schools of applied 
science. Unhappily, much of this fund was wasted out- 
right by thriftless management. Much more was in some 
States half- wasted by the formation of separate schools for 
applied science, where State colleges of the old type already 
existed. Indeed, in many States, the college and the 
technical school were so far separated, that the legislators 
of 1868 saw in them nothing in common. Nevertheless, 
the highest wisdom in education is to bring the various 
influences together wherever it is possible. There is no 
knowledge which is not science, and there can be no 
applied science without the basis of pure science on which 
to rest. Schools of applied knowledge cannot be legiti- 
mately separated from schools of knowledge. But 
whatever the use made of the money, the passage of the 
Morrill Act in the interest of applied science has given 



THE ONE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS. 197 

scientific work a prominence in our colleges it did not 
have before. It has given science definite rights in the 
curriculum where before it seemed to exist by sufferance. 

I congratulate the State of Illinois that its university- 
is one university; that its pure and applied science, its 
literature, history, philosophy, and art are taught in one 
institution, by one united faculty. The best results in 
any line of education cannot be reachad without the 
association of all others. The training of the engineer 
will be the more valuable from his association with the 
classical student. The literary man may gain much, and 
will lose nothing, from his acquaintance with the practical 
work of the engineer. The separation of the schools 
founded by the Morrill Act from the State university, as 
we have seen in nearly half the States of the Union, was 
a blunder which time will deepen into a crime. With the 
union of the two has come the rapid growth of the uni- 
versities of Wisconsin, California, Illinois, Minnesota, and 
Nebraska, when the higher work of the State is all con- 
centrated in one place. 

The freedom of choice has not worked to the advan- 
tage of science alone. The element of consent in college 
study has brought about a revival in classical education 
as well as in science. It is not certain even that more 
science studies are chosen by students, under the elective 
system than were taken on the old plan of a required cur- 
riculum. But the work is done in a different spirit. The 
colleges and the investigators are being drawn together. 
There is no line of investigation in which the college 
cannot help, if the investigators have freedom to use it. 
The scientific men are being drawn into sympathy with 
higher education. Men are now in college who under 



198. SCIENCE AND THE COLLEGES. 

the former system would have been self-made men, with 
all the disadvantages that isolation implies. Education 
gives the ability to enter into the labors of others; and 
the scientific man of to-day must use every advantage, if 
he is to make his own work an advance in knowledge. 
He must know what has been done by those who have 
gone before him. He must use their highest achieve- 
ments as a basis for further progress. Science cannot let 
go of its past. And to the self-made man of science, 
struggle as he may, the books of the past are at least 
partially closed. 

Twenty-five years ago the college repelled rather 
than aided tnen of science. After a brief experience 
in college, many men of scientific interests went away 
and carried on their own studies in their own fashion. 
And others similarly situated, with aspirations in liter- 
ature, history, or engineering, stayed away, and grew 
up untouched by the higher education of their times. 
The elective system provides for such as these. It not 
only gives a new impulse to the students' work, but it 
brings a new body of students under collegiate influences. 

Nothing in our educational history has been more 
remarkable than the increase in numbers of students in 
our principal colleges, and the corresponding increase in 
influence of these schools, within the last ten years. Yet 
nothing is more evident than the fact that these students 
are not going to college in the old-fashioned sense. The 
old-fashioned college ideals are not rising in value; but 
new possibilities of training and the inspiration of mod- 
ern thought bring to the university all sorts and condi- 
tions of men and women whose predecessors twenty 
years ago would not have thought of entering an Ameri- 



THE COLLEGE MEN OF THE FUTURE. 199 

can college. Where old educational ideas still reign, be 
the college rich or poor, there is no increase in numbers 
nor in influence. Unless a college education involves 
the emancipation of thought, unless it gives something 
to think about, it has no place in the educational system 
of the future. The future of our country will rest with 
college men, because the college of the future will meet 
the needs of all men of power, and draw them to its walls. 

Scientific men have no wish to underestimate literary 
or classical training. The revolution in our higher edu- 
cation is not a revolt against the classics. It is an appeal 
from the assumption that the classics furnish the only 
gate to culture. It asserts the existence of a thousand 
gates — as many ways to culture as there are types of men. 
Scientific training asks only for freedom of development, 
and for the right to be judged by its own fruits. 

With the growth of investigation has come the demand 
for better means of work, better apparatus, more and 
better books, larger collections, and especially collections 
for work, not for show or surprise. Better teachers are 
needed, and more of them. A healthy competition is 
set up, by which in these later days a man's pay is in 
some degree proportioned to his power, and the com- 
petition for places among half-starved men is changing 
into a competition for men among rich and ambitious 
institutions. 

One of the great changes which have come to Ameri- 
can education has been the extension of scientific methods 
to many subjects formerly deemed essentially unscien- 
tific. For this change the Influences which have come 
to us from Germany are largely responsible. Thirty 
years ago the mental philosophy which formed the 



20O SCIENCE AND THE COLLEGES. 

staple of the work of the college president was thoroughly 
dogmatic, like his moral science and his political economy. 
It was a completed subject, having its base in speculation 
and its growth by logical deductions, and no thought of 
experimental proof or of advancement by investigation 
was ever brought before the student. 

Now psychology is completely detached from meta- 
physics, and is an experimental science as much as 
physiology or embryology. By its side ethics and 
pedagogics are ranging themselves — the scientific study 
of children and the study of the laws of right, by the 
same methods as those we use to test the laws of chem- 
ical affinity. Metaphysics, too, has ranged itself among 
the historical sciences. It is the study no longer of intu- 
itive and absolute truth, but the critical investigation of 
the outlook of man on the universe, as shown through 
the history of the ages. The old metaphysical idea is 
passing away, soon to take its place with the science of 
the dark ages in which it rose. 

History, too, is no longer a chronicle of kings and 
battles. It is the story of civilization, the science of 
human society and human institutions. The Germans 
have taught us that all knowledge is science, capable of 
being placed in orderly sequence, and of being increased 
by the method of systematic investigation. 

The study of language now finds its culmination in the 
science of philology, the science of the growth of speech. 
Every branch of learning is now studied, or may be 
studied, inductively, and studied in the light of the con- 
ception of endless and orderly change, to which we give 
the name of evolution. This conception has come to 
be recognized as one underlying all human knowledge. 



SCHOLARS MAKE THE UNIVERSITY. 201 

Seasons return because conditions return, but the condi- 
tions in the world of Hfe never return. The present we 
know, but we can know it thoroughly only in the light 
of the past. What has been must determine what is, 
and the present is bound to the past by unchanging law. 
All advance in knowledge implies a recognition of this 
fact. The study of science must be grounded in the 
conception of orderly change, or change in accordance 
with the laws of evolution. 

It is, after all, the presence of scholars that makes the 
university. It is in such men that the University of 
Illinois has its existence. It is located neither in Cham- 
paign nor in Urbana; it is wherever its teachers may be, 
wherever its workers have gone. We have met to-day 
to dedicate its science hall. To the future work in this hall 
we do all honor, but we do not think of it as a new hall, 
nor a new creation. It is simply a natural outgrowth of 
the work of Burrill and Forbes. Ever since, in 1878, I 
visited the little zoological workshop of Dr. Forbes in 
the old school building at Normal, and ever since, in 
1882, I saw toadstools and bacteria in the little room 
across the way, which Dr. Burrill called his own, I have 
been able to prophesy the growth of this building. We 
care nothing for the brick building, its desks, its shelves, 
and its microscopes, as things in themselves. We are 
thinking of Forbes and Burrill. The building is only a 
better tool-house in which these master-workmen can 
shelter their tools. Their work will be what it was 
before. And in this impulse and example is our best 
guarantee that so long as this building stands we shall 
find in it master-workmen. Another Forbes, another 
Burrill, another Rolfe shall fill the gaps when these lay 



202 SCIENCE AND THE COLLEGES. 

down their work, and the University of Illinois shall live 
through the years, because the men who compose it are 
truthful, devoted, and strong. 



XIII. 
THE PROCESSION OF LIFE.* 

10NCE walked one Saturday afternoon out from the 
city of Canterbury across the fields of Kent. The hops 
were ripe on the chalk hills; for the growing of hops is 
the chief industry in that part of England. The hop- 
pickers had finished their week's work and were return- 
ing to their homes in Canterbury for their Sunday rest. 
I walked out on the Gadshill road and met them on the 
way — a long, long procession of modern pilgrims. 
They came by hundreds and hundreds. There may 
have been five thousand of them in all. In the lead 
were the young and vigorous, the stalwart young man, 
the spirited young woman, those who thought nothing 
of a ten-mile walk when the day' s work was over. Next 
came the older ones, equally strong, but more serious, 
who went on their way with an even step; while behind 
these, in the main body of the procession, were the old 
and the young, those whose strength was passing and 
those to whom strength had not yet come. 

Then, behind the middle came those who had more 
than themselves to carry; men leading boys or girls, 
women with baskets, or with children who clung to their 
skirts. Still behind these were women carrying babies, 
and men limping on crutches. And, last of all, were 
men who had taken the burden of a load of gin from 

* Address to graduating class, University of Indiana, 1890. 
203 



204 THE PROCESSION OF LIFE. 

some wayside tavern; for the heaviest load a man can 
carry is the weight of a glass of Hquor. 

And the thought came to me, as I watched them, that 
this modern procession of pilgrims to Canterbury was 
but a fragment of a greater procession which moves 
before our eyes all our lives — the endless procession in 
which you who go from us to-day step forth to form a 
part. The thought of a Pilgrim's Progress, as it came to 
John Bunyan in the Bedford jail, is one which rises 
naturally as we look over the course of human life. 
What loads have we to carry, and how shall we come 
to our journey's end? We start with our burdens of 
hereditary weaknesses and hereditary sins, and to these 
we add many new ones which we take up along the road. 
What prospect have we of reaching Canterbury before 
the sun goes down ? And of what avail are our efforts 
on the road if we never reach Canterbury ? 

Or, laying aside the metaphor, which may prove cum- 
bersome, we meet the old question which comes afresh to 
every man, though countless generations have attempted 
its solution; what for us constitutes success in life? Cer- 
tainly not the gaining of wealth, though many of our 
fellow-pilgrims seem to think so. If it were wealth 
alone, we have surely missed the way. You are not on 
the right road. There is a shorter way to wealth than 
the way you have taken, though the road may not lead 
to Canterbury. If you spend your day searching for gold, 
you will find it. A man finds whatever he goes forth to 
seek; but gold has no value except the value your fellow- 
pilgrims agree to set upon it — the worth of the time, we 
may say, they waste when they stop to look for it. 
When a man is alone with gold, he is alone with — nothing. 



BROKEN LIVES. 



205 



Not fame alone can constitute success. The gods 
care little for what men say of one another. Not the 
acquisition of power alone. The force of man can 
change nothing which is not already bound to change. 
A lever can move the world only when applied to a 
world which is moving. The force of man counts for 
nothing when placed in opposition to the laws of human 
development. 

We are encompassed about by the forces that make 
for righteousness. All power we possess, or seem to 
possess, comes from our accord with these forces. There 
is no lasting force, except the power of God. All else 
in the world is speedily passing away. Is there no suc- 
cess for the individual ? Are all lives alike ineffective ? 
Not so. Measured by the standard of the Infinite, all 
life is short, and weak, and impotent; yet we know that, 
gauged by the measure of a man, there are many lives 
which are successful. We have all come in contact with 
such, and our own lives have been the richer for the 
contact. But we know, too, that there are broken lives. 
We pass them on the road. They stagger against us 
from the tavern steps. They are carried on for a time 
by the procession; but having no impulse of their own, 
they drop farther and farther behind — sometimes alone, 
sometimes dragging others with them. 

These are not successful lives. What lessons do they 
teach ? What have these broken lives in common ? 
And what is this common element which we who hope 
for success can avoid ? Is it poverty ? Is life a failure 
if we gain not wealth, we v/ho now live in the wealthiest 
of all times, here among the richest of all peoples ? 

There are many who think this. Poverty is pictured 



2o6 THE PROCESSION OF LIFE. 

as the yawning and relentless gulf beneath our whole civ- 
ilization. If we avoid poverty, are we assured against 
all forms of spiritual failure ? 

We know that this is not true. Broken lives are as 
common among the rich as among the poor. In the 
palace and the hovel we may look for them alike. 
Chronic poverty may be a sign of a withered spirit, but 
it is not the cause. The real disease lies far behind this, 
as those know well who have tried to heal the sores of 
poverty by filling them with gold. 

Poverty, in itself, is not even a cause for discourage- 
ment. Poverty has been through the ages the heritage 
of the student, and in the procession of life the student 
has never walked in the rear. You who stand before 
me, the flower of our student body, do not stand with 
well- filled purses. Your money and lands, to take the 
average, would not keep you for a single year. The 
inmates of many poorhouses could make a better actual 
showing than you could make to-day. Yet you are not 
paupers. No one dreams of thinking you such. You 
have something, not money, which helps you to face the 
future. And it is something real — something which has 
a quotable value. No; the element of likeness in broken 
lives is not their poverty. 

Is it sickness or weakness which makes failure in life ? 
We know that it is not. Stalwart frames stand all about 
us from which the spirit seems to have fled, while there 
are other souls whom no pain or disease can tame. The 
great name of the nineteenth century cannot be that of 
an unsuccessful man; yet for forty years of his earnest 
and beautiful life Darwin knew not a single day of health 
such as other men enjoy — not a single day such as 



LIFE MADE WORTHY. 207 

comes unasked and unappreciated to you and to me. 
Health is much, but it is not everything. A withered 
arm does not mean a broken spirit. 

What then can we ask as our surety against failure? 
That which we seek, does it not lie in the very heart of 
man, the presence of a reason for living ? Is not this 
the one touchstone which through the ages has separated 
success from failure in life ? If a man live for worthy 
ends, his life is made worthy. With a lifelong purpose, 
and a purpose worthy of a life, there can be no failure. 
How can there be ? Be a life long or short, its complete- 
ness depends on what it was lived for. 

Stand for something — something worthy to build a 
life around. As your aim, so your life is. Your purpose, 
like an amulet, will guard you from failure. While it 
remains intact, your life cannot be broken. Poverty 
cannot hold you down, disease cannot weaken, adversity 
cannot crush. Your life remains, and you alone can 
break it. It takes a strong impulse to live a life out to 
the end. If you live to no true purpose, your life is a 
burden on the atmosphere, and death will come to you 
long before you even suspect it. All around you are 
those who have died already — perhaps never have lived 
at all. More terrible than ghosts or disembodied spirits 
is the spectacle we see every day of spiritless bodies — 
the forms of those who move and breathe when we know 
them to be dead. 

And so, when as year by year your paths diverge over 
the earth, let us hope and pray, that you may live your 
lives out to the end; that at every roll-call in this world, 
when you answer to your names, it will be in the full cer- 
tainty that you are still alive. • 



XIV. 
THE GROWTH OF MAN.* 

A WISE man once said, "The Bible was written by 
outdoor men; if we would understand it, we must 
read it out of doors. ' ' They were shepherds and fisher- 
men who wrote the Bible; men who, night after night, 
lay under the stars, and to whom the grass on the 
Judsean hills had been the softest of pillows. Even kings 
and prophets were out-of-door men in the days of Sam- 
uel and David. Out-of-door men speak of out-of-door 
things, and each man who speaks with authority must 
speak of things which he knows. 

In this fact, if you will let me compare small things to 
great, you will find my apology for speaking my mes- 
sage to-day in my own way. I wish to draw certain 
lessons in morals from certain facts, or laws, in the sci- 
ences of which I know something. For we study what 
we call Nature, not for the objects themselves, but be- 
cause the study brings us nearer to the heart of things, 
nearer to the final answer to all the problems of death 
and of life. 

There is a stage in the development of the human 
embryo when it is not yet human, when it cannot be dis- 
tinguished fi'om the embryo of other mammals, as of a 
dog or a sheep. There may be, at the same time, two 
embryos apparently alike, the one destined to be a dog, 

* Commencement Address, University of Indiana, 1889. 
208 



THE POTENTIALITY IN EMBRYOS. 209 

because of its canine ancestry; the other, in like manner, 
to become human. These two, we may assume, may be 
absolutely alike to all the tests we can offer. They differ 
neither in structure, nor in form, nor in chemical compo- 
sition. The lines along which they develop seem par- 
allel for a time, but at last divergence becomes evident, 
and their courses separate forever. The one seems to 
lose, little by little, its human possibilities, while the other 
goes too far in its way ever to turn aside to doghood. 
The one moves toward its end as man; the other toward 
its destiny as dog. 

But a difference must exist, even when the identity of 
the two seems most perfect — a difference intangible, 
immaterial, but none the less potent in its certainty to 
lead to results. The one embryo holds within it the pos- 
sibility of humanity which the other has not. No condi- 
tions of which we can conceive will bring the dog embryo 
to manhood, because the possibility of manhood is not in 
it. There is something which transcends chemistry, 
which tends to bring each embryo through many changes 
to a predetermined end. 

This is essentially true if the development be complete 
and normal. If its growth goes on in the wonted fash- 
ion, it becomes what it can become. Its enclosed poten- 
tiality, or hidden powers, give form to its life. But not 
all development is normal. Growth may cease prema- 
turely, or it may be cut short by death, and that which 
might have been a man becomes as nothing; or arrested 
development may leave a state of perpetual immaturity. 
This happens among men sometimes. There are dwarfs 
in body and dwarfs in mind — those who reach the age 
of manhood while retaining the stature or the intellect of 



2IO THE GROWTH OF MAN. 

children. Again, decay and decline come sooner or 
later to all living things. If decline begins prematurely, 
we have degeneration instead of development. What is 
true of man in these regards is true of all life in its de- 
gree; for there is no law of human development which 
does not, in corresponding measure, apply to animals 
and plants. 

On the other hand, progress begets progress. Natur- 
alists tell us of cases of development beyond ancestral 
lines, of perfection beyond previous completeness. In 
such growth, the conditions which mark full maturity in 
the ancestor become phases of youth in the ambitious 
progeny. The maturity of the latter in one or more ways 
overleaps ancestral lines. Such advanced development 
here and there through the organic world is one of the 
causes of the progress of the mass. By the side of the 
philosopher the common man seems like a child. The 
development of great souls has gone on in accordance 
with a higher potentiality than ours. Or, rather, it may 
be in accordance with a potentiality which we possess, 
but which has lain dormant within us. For great men 
need great occasions. Circumstances affect all develop- 
ment. They may draw us out, or they may hem us in. 
They may raise us, as it were, above ourselves, or they 
may close around us, so that the man we ought to have 
been we are only in our dreams. And if the environment 
be too exacting, even these dreams cease at last. 

The lower animals and plants offer analogies to this. 
Each individual develops along the line of the resultant 
between the force of its own potentiality and the resist- 
ance of its environment. Thus, all degrees of fitness are 
produced, and from these varying degrees comes our 



ACCELERATION IN DEVELOPMENT. 211 

perception of the law of the survival of the fittest in the 
struggle for existence. One of the primal causes of 
difference in organic life lies in the conditions of advanced 
or retarded development. A higher — that is, a more 
definitely developed — organism is one that has taken a 
step in its growth beyond those taken by its ancestors. 
It has omitted non-essential phases and has leaped at 
once to a higher range of its possibilities. It has come 
so much nearer the fulfillment of the potentialities within 
it. Another organism may stop short of ancestral ac- 
quirements. It is degenerate; for less of its potentiality 
has become actuality than in its ancestors. 

Florists save the seed of their fairest flowers, that from 
these the species may reach still higher perfection. 
Stock-breeders recognize that individual gains are inher- 
ited, and they choose their stock accordingly. So we 
have, year by year, swifter race-horses, better milk cows, 
sheep with heavier fleece, more sagacious dogs, and 
pigeons of more fantastic forms. Along certain lines of 
development anything is possible with time and patience. 
Because this is so, with each generation our domestic 
animals and plants become better and better adapted to 
satisfy man's needs or man's fancy. But the potentiality 
of the race-horse was in the old nag, its far-off ancestor, 
who may have trotted his leisurely mile in ten minutes. 
The potentiality of the trained dog, * ' who can do any- 
thing but talk," lay in the gaunt and cowardly wolf, 
from which the races of dogs are descended. 

More perfect development comes from within, and is 
assisted, not caused, by favorable surroundings. This is 
shown in the very terms we use. We educate — that is, 
we "lead out" We develop — that is, we "unwrap" 



L 



212 THE GROWTH OF MAN. 

what was hidden in the original package. We evolve — 
that is, we ''unroll/' as the ball of the fern-bud unrolls 
into the great fern leaf. And so we unroll, unwrap, lead 
out whatever is already within. We can help to actualize 
latent possibilities. But whatever is finally brought forth 
existed in potentiality in the embryo, no matter how 
inert and impotent this may have been. But not alone 
in the embryo; for whatever is in the embryo must have 
been a possibility with the parent. 

No great thing comes from nothingness. There must 
have been strength behind it. There must have been a 
potential Lincoln in Lincoln's humble ancestry, else a 
Lincoln could not have been. We can trust that studies 
in genealogy will some time show this. In each life there 
must exist a potentiality of something not yet attained. 
Were it not so, the bounds of progress would be already 
reached, and swifter horses, brighter flowers, sweeter 
songs, nobler thoughts, and purer lives than have already 
been there could never be. Potentiality may be con- 
ceived as a series of direct lines leading from the past 
into the future, outward into space. The highest poten- 
tiality is that one of these lines which most favors 
fullness of life. For any organism to grow along this 
highest line is for it to make the most of itself — and the 
most of its descendants, too; for the will to do the best 
may fall into the grasp of heredity. The gain of the 
individual becomes the birthright of the race. The man 
of yesterday is a child beside the man of to-morrow. 
Our ancestors of centuries ago dwelt beside the Swiss 
lakes in children's playhouses. Whatever one genera- 
tion has tried persistently to do, the next may accomplish 
easily. If by effort we have, as it were, excelled our- 



GREAT MEN ARE THE REAL MEN. 213 

selves, our children may also without effort excel us in 
the same line. The man we dream of will be above the 
weaknesses of past humanity. The perfect man will be 
the master of the world, because the perfect master of 
himself. 

As in the physical world there are many departures 
from the normal type, there may be partial, distorted, or 
degraded development. In the moral world the same 
conditions exist; and such departures from the ideal 
type we call sin. Sin is man's failure to realize his 
highest possibilities. Its measure is the discrepancy 
between the actual and the possible man. It is the 
spiritual analogue of retrograde or distorted develop- 
ment. Personal degeneration is sin. Misery, in general, 
is nature's protest against personal degeneration. 

Total depravity is not the state of nature. It is the 
good man who is natural; it is the weak and vicious who 
are least human. *' Great men are the true men," says 
Amiel, " the men in whom nature has succeeded. They 
are not extraordinary. They are in the true order. It 
is the other kinds of men that are not what they ought 
to be. If we wish to respect men, we must forget what 
they are and think of the ideal they have hidden in them 
— of the just man and the noble, the man of intelligence 
and goodness, inspiration and creative force, who is loyal 
and true, — of the higher man and that divine thing we 
call soul. The only men who deserve the name are the 
heroes, the geniuses, the saints, the harmonious, power- 
ful, and perfect examples of the race." 

If, then, sin is retarded or distorted development, 
righteousness is further development along the line of our 
ethical possibilities. Righteousness is thus achieved only 



214 I^HE GROWTH OF MAN. 

by constant effort in the direction of self-control and self- 
devotion. As Aristotle says, ' ' Nature does not make 
us either good or bad; she only gives us the opportunity 
to become good or bad — that is, of shaping our own char- 
acters." ** Emphasize as you will," says Dr. Schur- 
mann, ' * the bulk of the inheritance I have received from 
my ancestors, it still remains that in moral character I 
am what I make myself. ' ' This is the higher heredity, 
the aggregate of all our own past actions or conditions; 
our deeds in the * * vanished yesterdays that rule us abso- 
lutely." *' On stepping-stones of their dead selves do 
men rise to higher things." And in a similar way, on 
stepping-stones of their ancestry, do races of men rise 
to higher civilization. But without effort, conscious or 
unconscious, in the direction of a higher life, each suc- 
ceeding generation will fail to rise above the level of 
those before it. Then, as nothing is stable in the world 
of life, where there is no advance there will be retro- 
gression. And thus have fallen all races, and nations, 
and communities whose guiding principle has not been 
the fulfillment of duty. 

If there be any truth at the basis of these analogies, 
they are susceptible of wide application to the affairs 
of human life. 

The central thought of modern biology is that all life is 
bound together by heredity, the ancestry of all beings 
going back with gradual changes through countless ages 
to simpler and simpler forms. Connected with this is 
the fact that the various stages in the development of an 
embryo correspond essentially with the conditions of full 
development in the creatures which, one before another, 
have preceded its appearance in geological history. 



CONDUCT THAT JUSTIFIES ITSELF. 215 

* * The physical life of the individual is an epitome of 
the history of the group to which it belongs." The 
embryonic life of the child corresponds in a general way 
to the history of the group which culminates in man. 
The stages in the mental development of the child 
of this century represent roughly the stages passed 
through in the infancy of our race. In this sense each 
life is a condensation of the history of all life. *' In every 
grave," says the German proverb, ''lies a world's his- 
tory." 

From our study of evolution arises the new science 
of ethics, which teaches what ought to be from the 
knowledge of what has been. ' ' Time was, unlocks the 
riddle of Time is. ' ' The central question in this study 
cannot be, as some have said, ' * what in the past man has 
thought ought to be," but what in the past has justified 
itself by leading man on to higher things. We can dis- 
cover traces of the path which humanity shall tread, by 
looking backward over the road humanity has trodden, 
not alone over the early history of man; for only the 
smaller portion of this is within our reach. Our history 
of man is only a history of civilization; for barbarism 
writes no history. We can look beyond the clouded 
period of human barbarism to the still older history 
which we share with the brute. If we find the line of 
direction of past development from animalism to civiliza- 
tion, we may in a way project this line into the future as 
the direction of human progress. 

What is this line of direction ? How does man differ 
from the brute ? 

The intellect of man is certainly a distinctive posses- 
sion. It is not necessary, as has been said, ' ' to deny 



2i6 THE GROWTH OF MAN. 

intelligence to the lower animals when we assert that the 
human mind is the most colossal and revolutionary of all 
the modifications any species has undergone." It is not 
necessary to deny the elements of conscience to a dog or 
a horse in recognizing the fact that conscience is one of 
the essential attributes of manhood. The feeling of 
individual responsibility, the knowledge of good and evil 
— this is man's burden and his glory. Intellect and con- 
science — these are the acquisitions won by humanity, 
and by virtue of which it is humanity. 

This thought need not prevent our recognition of the 
natural origin of these powers; for all phenomena are 
alike natural. The simple automatic reflex action in which 
the psychic force of the lower animals expresses itself is 
unquestionably the prototype of all nervous processes. 
Sensation — thought — action : this is the only order 
in which these phenomena can arise. The senses are 
the only source of action. All thought tends to pass 
over into deeds, and no mental process is complete until 
it has wrought itself into action. The brain has no 
teacher save the sensory nerves, which bring it knowl- 
edge. Its only servant is the muscles, for by their agency 
alone can it reach the outside world. In its essence, the 
intellect is tlie ability to choose among many possible 
responses in action. Simple reflex action, or "instinct," 
has no choice. It acts automatically, and in its one 
unchanging way. To choose one act rather than another 
is an intellectual process. This power of choice brings 
its responsibilities. Whoever chooses must choose aright. 
Wrong choice carries its own destruction. The con- 
science is the recognition, more or less automatic, that 
some lines of choice are better than others, and must be 



ORIGIN OF CONSCIENCE, 217 

followed. By ** better," in this connection, we must mean 
favoring life. That is best that ' * brings life more abun- 
dantly. ' ' That is best which brings self-realization to 
the individual and to his fellows. In social life, self- 
seeking is not "right," even for the individual. For 
the welfare of the one is bound up in the welfare of all. 
Here arises the ever-present problem of the conciliation 
of the claims of oneself and the claims of others. To 
solve this problem is part of the work of the rational life. 
All right must be relative. It may be compared to a line 
of direction rather than a position in space. There can 
be no absolute righteousness. If there were, it would 
mark the limit of spiritual growth. 

To show the origin of conscience by the natural pro- 
cesses of development and competition in life is not to 
deny its existence or to lower its importance. All things 
we know are natural alike — the creation of man, or the 
formation of a snow-bank. All are aUke supernatural; for 
the nature we know is not the whole of nature. Any 
fact or process becomes exalted when we see it in its true 
relation, as inherent in the nature of things. Right 
conduct, so Emerson tells us, is *' conformity in action 
to the nature of things, and the nature of things makes 
it prevalent. ' ' The automatic or rational recognition of 
the fact that one response is better than another is an 
attribute of man. The stronger the conscience of man 
or race, the higher its place in the scale of spiritual 
development. The conscience is the real essence of that 
"something not ourselves that makes for righteousness." 
For that "something," though "not ourselves," has 
its seat in the nature of man. The fulfillment of the 
noblest possibilities of the individual — that is right. 



2i8 THE GROWTH OF MAN. 

What falls short of this is arrest of development, imper- 
fection, sin. 

The conscience no more than any other group of 
mental processes can claim infallibility. It may be dis- 
torted, dormant, ineffective. A "clear" conscience is 
of itself the result of normal development. Arrested 
development is none the less a fault that its subject is 
not aware of it. Nature absolves no sinner on the plea 
of ignorance of her laws. The bent twig is none the 
less bent that outside influences have done the bending. 
The tree should have grown upright, and in this it has 
failed. 

It is often said that conscience is only relative; that 
what is right to-day will be wrong to-morrow, and there 
can be no absolute good but the pleasure or the utility 
of the individual. What is the truth of this ? Let us 
take for illustration the customs and laws of marriage. 
The patriarchs of old did wrong, so the chronicles tell 
us; but neither the patriarchs nor their prophets, scath- 
ing moralists though these were, counted the possession 
of many wives as even the least of their wrong- doings. 
The sin of David lay not in taking another wife, but in 
the murder which gave him possession of her. Our 
civilization now condemns polygamy, and our statutes 
and beliefs tend to exalt the sanctity and the unity of the 
home. Is marriage for life but a fashion of the time, 
to pass away as polygamy has done, when opposite tend- 
encies have sway? Is the one really right, and the 
other really wrong? What tests can we apply to this 
question ? 

It can be shown, I think, that the richest human life 
is dependent upon the development of the home. The 



GROWTH OF THE HOME. 219 

elevation of woman has been the keystone in modern 
social development. The ennobling of the wife and 
mother means the elevation of the race. And the eleva- 
tion of woman is impossible in polygamy. If this be 
true, the highest potentiality of the race can be brought 
about only through the marriage of the equal man with the 
equal woman. It may be literally true that polygamy, 
wife-beating, wife-selling, and similar practices were right 
in the infancy of the race. They may be right among 
races still in their infancy. ' ' It is their condemnation 
that light has come into the world. ' ' They may be part 
of a stage of growth through which humanity must pass 
before higher things are possible. 

In like manner, we have gone through a slow process 
of development in our regard for the rights of others. To 
the lower animals, each other animal is an alien and an 
enemy. A little higher in the scale we observe the rudi- 
ments of family, or social, life; yet, in a general way, to 
the brute all other brutes are objects of suspicion and 
hatred. The earlier tribes of men killed the stranger, 
and doubtless ate him, too, with perfect serenity of con- 
science. Even the most enlightened nation of ancient 
times murdered and robbed all alien to their race, as a 
high and sacred duty toward the Lord. Their God was 
a god of battles. 

Every foot of soil in Europe bears the stain of blood 
wantonly shed. There is not a moment in its history 
but has been marked by some cry of anguish. The 
history of the Old World has been one long story of 
needless suffering and needless waste. Yet the wave of 
brutality has been an ever-receding tide. With each cen- 
tury it rises never so high again. We have seen the last 



220 THE GROWTH OF MAN. 

St. Bartholomew, the last Bloody Assizes, and perhaps the 
last Waterloo and the last Sedan. The old house * * in 
Duizend Vreezen, " the house of the ** thousand terrors," 
on the marketplace of Rotterdam, stands as a memorial 
of what can never happen again. Human life is growing 
sacred. The history of civilization is a story of the 
growth of kindness and tolerance among men. 

The history of slavery teaches us the same lesson. 
Once to enslave a conquered enemy was to treat him 
with comparative kindness. Slavery is a positive advance 
from cannibalism, or from massacre. We find no con- 
demnation of slavery in the early history of the Jews. 
We find none in the early history of Europe. Slaves 
have been bought and sold in our country by strong, 
pure men, who felt no rebuke of conscience. The heroes 
of the Revolutionary history were not abolitionists. 

Yet it is true, ' * for the Lord hath said it, " * that the 
man of the future will not be a slave-holder. There 
can be no free men in a land where some are slaves, 
because whatever oppression comes to my neighbor in 
some sort comes to me. '' He hath made of one 
blood all the nations of the earth, ' ' and ' ' Whatsoever 

* This metaphor may find its justification in the lines of Maurice Thomp- 
son: 

— " I am a Southerner. 
I love the South. I dared for her 
To fight from Lookout to the Sea 
With her proud banner over me. 
But from my lips thanksgiving broke 
When God in battle thunder spoke. 
And that black idol, breeding drouth 
And dearth of human sympathy, 
Throughout the sweet and sensuous South, 
Was, with its chains and human yoke 
Blown hellward from the cannon's mouth 
While Freedom cheered behind the smoke." 



OUR BROTHERS, THE LOWER ANIMALS. 221 

ye do to one of the least of these my brethren, ye do it 
unto me.'* 

We know that humanity is growing toward the recog- 
nition of the need of equal opportunity for all men and 
women. The cardinal doctrine of democracy is * ' Equal 
rights for all, exclusive privileges to none. ' ' This is the 
tendency of human institutions. " We hold these truths 
to be self-evident," said our fathers a century ago, "that 
all men are created free and equal, endowed with certain 
inalienable rights, and that among these rights are life, 
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. " And these rights 
cannot be denied, even though the image of God shine 
faintly through a dusky skin. 

The feeling of brotherhood is extending to the brute 
creation. A society for ' * the prevention of cruelty to 
animals " would have been inconceivable in the days of 
Front-de-Bceuf or of Coeur-de-Lion. It is inconceivable 
now in those countries which are a century or two behind 
our race in the march of civilization. In the city of 
Havana, in the early morning, long lines of mules laden 
with pigs and sheep come in from the country. These 
animals' legs are bound, and they are slung head down- 
ward, in pairs saddlewise, over the back of a mule. Thus 
they come down from the mountains in long processions, 
the pigs lustily squealing, the sheep helpless and dumb. 
No one notes their suffering; for in Cuba no one seems 
to care for an animal's pain. On Sunday afternoons in 
the same city of Havana, fair ladies and gay cavaliers 
repair to the brightest of their festivals, the bull-fight. 
A bull-fight is not a fight; it is simply a butchery; a fair 
battle has some justification. The bull, maddened by 
pricks and stabs, is permitted to rip up and kill some 



222 THE GROWTH OF MAN, 

two or three feeble or blind horses, to be afterwards 
stabbed to death himself by a skillful butcher. A civil- 
ization which delights in scenes like this is to us simple 
barbarism. The growth of the race is away from such 
things. Cruelty to animals may not have been wrong 
when the race was undeveloped, and no conscience 
enlightened enough to condemn it. Cruelty in all its 
forms is a badge of immaturity, and toward neither man 
nor beast will the ideal man of the future be cruel. With 
time the feeling of brotherhood will extend to all living 
things, so far as community of sensation makes them 
akin to us. 

We cannot tell how far this feeling of brotherhood must 
go. This is certain, that our present relation toward 
animals, right as they may be now, will some day be 
barbarous. It may be that the time will come when the 
civilized man will feel that the rights of every living crea- 
ture on the earth are as sacred as his own. This end 
may be far away, too far for us even to dream of it; but 
anything short of this cannot be perfect civilization. 

** If man were what he should be," says Amiel, **he 
would be adored by the lower animals, toward whom he 
is too often the capricious and sanguinary tyrant. A day 
will come when our standard will be higher, our human- 
ity more exacting. * Homo homini lupus ^'' said Hobbes, 
' man toward men is a wolf. ' The time will come when 
man will be humane, even toward the wolf — 'homo lupo 
hofno.^ " 

No fact in Jewish history stands out more clearly than 
that of the gradual growth of the law of love. ' ' An eye 
for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" — even this marks a 
great advance over the ethics of the Ammonites and the 



LOVE YOUR ENEMIES. 223 

children of Heth. Yet between this and the Sermon on 
the Mount lies the whole difference between barbarism 
and the highest civilization. 

** Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy 
neighbor and hate thine enemy; but I say unto you, Love your 
enemies; bless them that curse you; do good to them that hate 
you." 

** But dig down, the old unbury, thou shalt find on every stone 
That each age has carved the symbol of that God to them was 

known. 
Ugly shapes and brutish sometimes; but the fairest that they 

knew; 
If their sight were dim and earthward, yet their hope and aim 

were true. 
As the gods were, so their laws were, Thor the strong might 

rave and steal. 
So through many a peaceful inlet tore the Norseman's eager 

keel. 
But a new law came when Christ came, and not blameless as 

before, 
Can we, paying Him our lip-tithes, give our lives and faiths to 

Thor." 

This question, then, is ours — Are we doing our part 
in the growth of the race ? In the current of life are we 
moving forward? Do our years mark milestones in 
humanity's struggle toward perfection? Is the god 
within us so much the more unrolled, when our develop- 
ment has reached its highest point ? Can we transmit to 
our children a better heritage of brain and soul than our 
fathers left to us ? Has the race through us gained some 
little in the direction of the law of love ? If we have 
done our part in this struggle, our lives have not been in 
vain. If we have shirked and hung back, then ours is a 



224 THE GROWTH OF MAN. 

line of retrograde descent, and our lineage is a withered 
branch on the tree of humanity. 

To live aright, is to guide our lives in the direction in 
which humanity is going — not all humanity, not average 
humanity, but that saving remnant from whose loins 
shall spring the better man of the future. The purpose 
of life is to be as near the man of the future as the man 
of the present can be. But we must be patient, with all 
our striving. The end of life is not yet. Humanity is 
still in its infancy, and this old world is old only in com- 
parison with the years of human life. Only through 
centuries on centuries of struggle and aspiration can 
humanity approach divinity and the law of love be 
supreme. 

Books have been written on the seven or eight ' ' de- 
cisive battles" in the history of civilization. Great 
battles there have been ; but the stake in any battle is 
less than it appears. There can have been no decisive 
battles. The growth in humanity goes on whether 
battles be lost or won. The leaven of Christianity 
would have wrought its work in Europe if Charles Martel 
had been overpowered by the Moors at Poitiers. A 
battle may decide the fate of a man or a nation, but not 
the fate of humanity. Kings cannot check its growth. 
Priests cannot smother it. It is never buried in the dust 
of defeat. 

Slavery died not because the battle of Gettysburg was 
lost. It was doomed from the beginning, and its death 
was only a question of time. Nothing could have saved 
it, and the success of its defenders on the field of battle 
would only have postponed the end. The forces of 
nature are fatal to it. Even the law of gravitation and 



THE MAN OF THE FUTURE. 225 

the multiplication-table would have conquered it at last. 
That which endures is that which brings out the higher 
potentialities of manhood. All else must pass away. 

Not long ago, in a gallery in Brussels, I saw that 
striking painting of Wiertz, * * The Man of the Future 
and the Things of the Past." The man of the future 
has in his open right hand a handful of marshals, guns, 
swords, and battle-flags, the paraphernalia of Napoleon's 
campaigns. These he is carefully examining with a 
magnifying-glass which he holds above them in his left 
hand. At the same time a child beside him looks on in 
open-eyed wonder that a man should care so much for 
such little things as these. For these banners and arms, 
so potent in their day, dwindle to the proportions of 
children's toys when seen in the long perspective of 
human development. 

The decline and fall of empires is not decline or decay. 
It is the breaking of the clods above the growing man. 
Kings and nations recede as man moves on. The love 
of country must merge into the higher patriotism, the 
love of man. Viewed as steps in the growth of ascend- 
ing humanity, the changes in history have a deeper 
meaning to us. Our studies become ennobled. What 
have been the conditions of growth in the past ? What 
conditions have led to decline and degradation ? What 
tends to keep the individual retarded and immature, and 
what tends to bring him farther toward the ultimate 
humanity ? 

Now, as we look back over the annals of slowly 
advancing humanity, and behold the gradual develop- 
ment in wisdom, skill, self-control, and kindness can we 
not also look forward along the same line to a future of 



226 THE GROWTH OF MAN. 

ideal manhood? If Christ be the perfect man, He is 
perfect in this, that the potentiality of the race finds its 
fulfillment in Him. Seen in contrast with the perfect 
humanity, all else that we know is but infantile. Decay 
and death overtake us long before we begin to realize 
any appreciable nearness to the sublime ideal of the 
Christian ^faith. 

* ' De Imitatione Christi ' ' is one of the grand books 
of the middle ages. * ' Imitation of Christ, ' ' so far as 
the imitation is real — not in speech, not in dress, not in 
ceremonies, but in the inner life, — this alone can place us 
in close harmony with nature, and closer with our fellow- 
men. The expression, *'love of God," is the love of 
good, the love of that which is abiding, in distinction 
from that which is merely temporal. It may reduce itself 
into love of the higher life, in which the progress of the 
race consists. For, in the words of the good Thomas a 
Kempis, ** It is vanity to love that which is speedily pass- 
ing away." In the despairing words of Guinevere may 
be heard the keynote of the conditions of growth: 
" It was my duty to have loved the highest ! " 

*'This is the first and great commandment. And the 
second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy- 
self. On these two commandments hang all the law and the 
prophets." 

What I have tried to say, I may sum up in a few 
words. There is an ideal manhood to which our human 
race must come. Every step toward this end which the 
individual man may take is a step won for humanity. 
The end rests with us. It is our part in life to work with 
all our strength toward the realization of ideal humanity, 
to add one more link to the chain which joins the man- 



THE IDEAL MANHOOD. 227 

brute of the past through the man of the present to the 
man of the future — the man who is likest Him we have 
chosen for our ideal. 



XV. 
THE SOCIAL ORDER.* 

IN the crude civilization of to-day there is no place for 
anarchy. Order is more important than even free- 
dom, and order must be upheld by force if it cannot be 
maintained in any other way. Yet the ideal of civiliza- 
tion must be perfect anarchy — order maintained from 
within, the recognition of order in the hearts of men; 
not order imposed upon men from without, but the 
forces within that make for righteousness of thought 
and action. The fruitage of civilization must be volun- 
tary co-operation. When this fruitage is reached, then 
it will be time for us to cast aside our present social 
order, to organize a new one adapted to the changed 
human nature of the coming time, if indeed the new one 
by that time is not already formed and adopted uncon- 
sciously and in spite of ourselves. We have been 
thousands of years working out the social order we have. 
It is the best that man has ever found; it is the best that 
has been possible with the weak and wayward men who 
are the units of civilization. It is easy to find fault with 
our present social organization. Like the men of whom 
it is made, it has thousands of crimes to answer for. It 
has been the chief of the " plug-uglies." It has ground 
slaves into the dust and murdered those who would be 
their liberators. In the name of law it still daily defies 

* Notes from an unpublished lecture. 
228 



THE PERFECT ANARCHY. :L:ii) 

all law. It daily stands, and must stand, for injustice and 
oppression, but it also stands for the removal of injustice 
and oppression, for the growth of knowledge, the lessen- 
ing of crime, the bringing of freedom to the oppressed, 
of wisdom to the foolish, of help to the unfortunate. It 
has throughout the ages been in advance of the men 
from whom it arises and of whom it is composed. Its 
movement is not the expression of the best in man. 
That could not be, for society is collective. Nor is it 
the expression of the worst, nor even of the average. It 
is better than the average, for this reason — that a good 
man has more weight in society and more force in him- 
self than a bad one; a strong man counts for more than 
a weak one, a wise man for more than a fool; and this 
will always be so. 

The perfect anarchy v/ill not come through dynamite. 
Dynamite is the weapon of a coward. The men who, 
by deeds of violence, have broken systems or shaken 
society have been the men who have given their own 
lives as a sacrifice, not the men who have given the lives 
or property of their neighbors. Such men as these 
have not needed to fortify themselves with stimulants 
nor with the enthusiasm or the cheers of others. It was 
not the courage of whisky that brought John Brown to 
the gallows nor John Huss to the stake. These men 
had no need to manufacture dynamite bombs or to kill 
the burghers that their influence might be felt. They 
gave themselves as a sacrifice to an unjust statute or an 
unjust decree, that people might learn to see clearly the 
difference between these and the laws of God. These 
laws have their basis, not in legislation, not in the statutes 



230 THE SOCIAL ORDER. 

of Congress, but in the very center of human nature, 
and can never be overthrown. Against law neither 
bullets nor ballots avail anything. But in mere statutes 
there is no force. Statutes are the manners and cus- 
toms; law is the life itself It is the expression of the 
onward movement of human civilization. A statute is 
a temporary compromise between struggling wills and 
jarring interests. It is the expression of the **patched- 
up broils of Congress." Through forms of statute men 
play at government, and in the long run in human 
development statutes count for nothing. Government 
by the people can be successful only as it becomes in 
time goverment by law, and not by statute. 

The very perfection of society must always appear as 
imperfection; for a highly developed society is dynamic. 
It is moving on. A static society, no matter how perfect 
it may seem, whether a Utopia, Icaria, or City of the 
Sun, is in a condition of arrested development. Its 
growth has ceased and its perfection is that of death. 
The most highly advanced social conditions are the most 
unstable. The individual man counts for most under 
such conditions; for the growth of the individual man is 
the only justification for the institutions of which he 
forms part. The most highly developed organism shows 
the greatest imperfections. The most perfect adaptation 
to conditions needs readaptation, as conditions them- 
selves speedily change. The dream of a static millen- 
nium, when struggle and change shall be over, when all 
shall be secure and all happy, finds no warrant in our 
knowledge of man and the world. Self-realization in 
life is only possible when self-perdition is also possible. 



LAW AND STATUTE. 231 

When cruelty and hate are excluded by force, charity 
and helpfulness will go with them. Strength and virtue 
have their roots within man, and not without. They 
may be checked but not greatly stimulated by institu- 
tions and statutes. 

Thoreau tells us that, ' ' as a snowbank rises when there 
is a lull in the wind, so when there is a lull in the truth 
an institution springs up. By and by, the truth blows 
on and sweeps it away." This truth which sweeps away 
institutions comes in the growth of the individual man. 
As his knowledge increases it is translated into action. 
In adapting himself to his environment, that which was 
the work of his own ignorance is swept away. By this 
means he is sometimes helpless, as the the lobster who 
has shed his shell. But the new shell he has formed, 
and which later he must likewise shed, is ever stronger 
and more roomy. 

In making their own statutes the people come dimly 
to see that there is a power behind and above their 
efforts — the power of the nature of man. Hence, 
slowly as the experiment of self-government goes on, 
the rule of the people changes from folly to wisdom, 
from caprice to principle, from selfishness to justice, 
from statute to law. This is the expression of the 
growth of civilization. It is the essence of government 
by public opinion. It is the justification of universal 
suffrage. Universal suffi-age is the expression of the 
growth of civilization, its extension downward, from 
rank to rank, from caste to caste — or, rather, from indi- 
vidual to individual. Thus *' freedom slowly broadens 



m. 



232 THE SOCIAL ORDER. 

down, from precedent to precedent. ' ' Each generation 
of men is as free as its character and training allows it to 
be. Each man has the rights he has the strength and 
wisdom to hold. 



Any mistake in statutes is followed always by going 
farther in the same direction. The harm done by stat- 
utes based on unemotional reasoning is nothing to the 
mischief due to unreasoning emotion. The man who 
refuses to reason is always sure to be wrong. Emotion 
is not virtue — not always on speaking terms with it. 
' ' Virtue is more dangerous than vice, because its excesses 
are unchecked by conscience," says a French writer. 
The most dangerous of moral ideas are those held by 
men without intellectual ideas. 

All goodness, all special helpfulness, is in some sense 
sacrifice, though this sacrifice may be recompensed in 
other ways. Men must be good if they are to live in 
society; that is, they must be considerate — "in honor 
preferring one another." But the virtues of men gov- 
ernments cannot have. A government cannot be good; 
it can simply be just; for government can sacrifice 
nothing. If it attempts to be kind as to the property 
and interests of others in one case, injustice results in 
other cases. Justice demands with all force that one set 
of interests shall not be sacrificed to another. Enforced 
sacrifice of the interests of others is not virtue, but 
injustice. Goodness must throw away self. The sacrifice 
must be self-sacrifice. Goodness enforced by law is cor- 
ruption and injustice. 



MEN MUST GIVE AND TAKE. 233 

Society seems to exist for its own sake, but it does 
not. It exists for the sake of the individuals; but when- 
ever society is imperiled, or in a struggle against its 
enemies, it must appear as a thing in itself. We must 
save our country in order to save ourselves. 

All. changes in human society and government must 
be dictated by wisdom, and actions must be right and 
wise. Hence the failure of the temperance movement 
and the populist movement as political attempts, because 
they are based on feeling, and on no scientific apprecia- 
tion of the laws which determine what should be done, 
and what can be done. Good intentions do not respue 
unwise actions from failure. A man of the best inten- 
tions is not always a good driver of an unruly team. 

The growth of man means the decline of the ma- 
chinery to control or to help him. He does not need 
governing when he has self-control. If he continuously 
needs special help, he is not a man, but a weakling or a 
degenerate. To give help at special times, for special 
needs, is part of the duty of altruism. All children are 
weaklings for the time being. They should be trained — 
never too much if wisely. But when full-grown, a man 
must give and take — give his power, and take the 
results of his actions. "To save men from the conse- 
quences of their folly," says Spencer, "is to fill the world 
with fools." 

By good or right in human development, we mean 
simply the opportunity for more life or higher life. That 
is good which makes me strong and gives strength to my 



234 THE SOCIAL ORDER. 

neighbors. Might does not make right; but whatever 
is right will justify itself in persistence; and persistence 
is strength. That which is weak dies. We only know 
God's purposes by what He permits. That which per- 
sists and grows, must be in line with such purposes. A 
law is only an observed generalization of what is. There 
is no law which reads, ' * This and this ought to be, but 
is not." 

The law of God is different from the ordinances framed 
in His name by bands calling themselves His servants. 
His law has binding force from eternity to eternity. The 
decrees of the church extend only to the bounds of its 
own vestry. The statutes of the state have validity only 
when its armies can secure their enforcement. 

A parable of the conduct of life shows man in a light 
skiff in a tortuous channel, beset with rocks, borne by a 
falling current to an unknown sea. He is kept awake 
by the needs of his situation. As his boat bumps against 
the rocks, he must bestir himself. If this contact were 
not painful, he would not heed it. If it were not hurtful, 
he would not need to heed it. Had he no power to act, 
he could not heed it if he would. But with sensation, 
will, and the impulse to act, narrow though the range 
of freedom of action may be, his safety rests in some 
degree in his own hands. That he has secured safety 
thus far is shown by the fact that he is alive. He may 
choose his course for himself — not an easy thing to do, 
unless he scans most carefully the nature of rocks and 
waves, and his control of the boat itself. He may follow 
the course of others with some degree of the safety 



THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 235 

that others have attained. He may follow his own im- 
pulses, the incentives those before him found safe as 
guides to action. But in new conditions neither conven- 
tionality, nor impulse, nor desire will suffice. He must 
know what is about him in order that he may know what 
he is doing. He must know what he is doing in order 
to do anything effectively. Blind action is more danger- 
ous than no action at all. He must be in friendly rela- 
tions with others, if for no other reason than that mutual 
help may bring a safety which no one could secure for 
himself alone. Wisdom is knowing what should be 
done next. Virtue is doing it. The will is man in 
action. The intellect is its guide. If the life of man, 
as thus pictured, be a life hemmed in by the inexorable 
Fates, then the Will is one of the Fates, and must take 
its place with the rest of them. The man who can will 
is a factor in the universe. 



XVI. 
THE SAVING OF TIME.* 

" 'T^HE gods for labor give us all good things.'* This 
1 was part of the philosophy of the ancient Greeks. 
They learned it as a fact of experience long before Epi- 
charnus first put it into words. Over and over again each 
generation of men tries its own experiments, and comes 
back to the same unvarying conclusion. In a thousand 
forms, in all languages, this idea has found its way into 
the wisdom of men. And it is a part of the same expe- 
rience that the gods never give anything worth having 
for any other price. In their dealings with men they 
receive no other coinage. They know no other meas- 
ure of value. Temporary loans they sometimes grant, 
but when the day of payment comes, they do not fail to 
charge their due rate of interest. They never change 
their valuations, and they never forget. 

*' By their long memories the gods are known." This 
proverb, like the other, has its source in a universal ex- 
perience. Taken from the forms of classic poetry and 
cast into the language of to-day, it indicates simply the 
universality of law. When they spoke of the gods in 
phrases like these, the Greeks meant what we, in a 
different way, personify as the *' Forces of Nature." 
These are the powers about us which act unceasingly, 
and in ways which never change. These are the realities 

* Commencement Address, University of Indiana, 1891. 
236 



THE FORCES OF NATURE. 237 

of the universe. All else is inert matter. Human knowl- 
edge consists in the recognition of these ways and forces. 
We learn to know them from our contact with them. 
Human power depends on acting in accord with such 
knowledge. In this lie the possibilities of man. He 
who knows the truth can trust all and fear nothing. 
There is no treachery in Nature's laws. He who strikes 
as the gods strike has the force of infinity in his blows. 
He who defies them wields a club of air. 

These laws are real and universal, and no man nor 
nation has ever accomplished anything in opposition to 
them. The existence of the simplest of these laws, those 
which, like the law of gravitation, can be exactly deter- 
mined, men now readily admit. The man who leaps from 
a precipice expects to be hurt when he reaches the earth. 
The law of falling bodies is too obvious to leave room for 
doubt as to its results. But the laws of organic life are 
less simple than these. The laws we but half understand 
we hope in some way to defeat. Most complex of all 
laws are those of ethics and economics. Because these 
are not well understood, and the relations of cause and 
effect are not easily traced, the average man believes that 
he is shrewd enough to break them and to escape the 
penalty. 

One of these laws of life which men are prone to dis- 
regard is that which decrees failure to him who seeks 
something for nothing, and well-being to him who pays 
as he goes. 

It is one of the truths of modern biology that progress 
in organic life comes through self-activity. In the last 
analysis most forms of advance in power or in specializa- 
tion of structure among- organisms reduces itself to the 



238 THE SAVING OF TIME, 

saving of time. Time must be measured in terms of 
effort, and the essence of progress is that none should 
shp by without effort or change. 

In the embryonic stages of the various animal forms 
there is a period when any two, higher and lower, are 
alike; in this, at least, that no tests we may apply can 
show a difference. One element of divergence comes 
through the varying rates of developments. Time is saved 
in the one organism; it is lost in the other. As growth 
goes on, the forms we call lower pass slowly through 
the various stages of life; their growth is altogether 
finished before any high degree of specialization is 
reached. The embryo of the higher form passes through 
the same course, but with a swiftness in some degree 
proportioned to its future possibility. Less time is spent 
on non-essentials, and we may say that, through the 
saving of time and force, it is enabled to push on to 
higher development. 

The gill structure of the fish, its apparatus for purify- 
ing the blood by contact with the air dissolved in water, 
lasts for its whole lifetime. In most fishes there is no 
hint that any other mode of respiration could exist, or 
could be effective. The frog, a higher animal than the 
fish, sustains for part of its life a similar apparatus, but a 
further development sets in, and at last the inherited 
structure of the gills gives place to organs which insure 
the contact of the blood with atmospheric air. Gill struc- 
tures are likewise inherited by the bird, and mammal, 
and man, as well as by the frog and fish; for by the law 
of heredity no creature can ever wholly let go of its past. 
The fact that its ancestors once breathed in water can 
never be entirely forgotten. The same stages of growth 



ACCELERATION AND RETARDATION 239 

are passed through in birds or mammals as in frogs or 
fishes, but long before the bird is hatched or the mammal 
is born, the gill structures have disappeared, or have 
suffered total modification. The true life of the new- 
animal is begun at a point far beyond the highest attain- 
ment of the frog or the fish. The law of acceleration 
hurries the embryo along through these temporary 
stages, and in this fact of acceleration comes the possi- 
bility of progress. 

On the other hand, with animal or plant, degeneration 
and degradation result from the loss of time. Retarded 
development is incomplete development. Whatever 
narrows the activity of the individual, whatever tends 
to make of life — be it of animal or man — simply a 
matter of eating and sleeping and a continuance of the 
species, leads to degradation and loss of effectiveness. 
The creatures which rule the world are the children of 
struggle and storm. The sheltered life leads to inability 
to live without shelter. The loss of self-activity makes 
parasites and paupers, whether among animals, or plants, 
or men. It is one of those universal laws which act 
through all ages and all organisms, through the long 
memories of all the gods, that the creature which does 
not translate time into growth shall drop out of existence. 

And now, leaving the lower orders of life aside, I wish 
to consider some relations of these laws of self-activity 
to our own lives and the lives of our neighbors. "A 
nation," it has been wisely said, ''is an assemblage of 
men and women who can take care of themselves." 
Whatever influence strengthens this power in the indi- 
vidual makes the nation strong; and, conversely, the 
presence of every man or woman who does not, or can- 



240 THE SAVING OF TIME. 

not, take care of himself, casts an additional burden on 
the rest. This power of self-support goes with the saving 
of the individual time. Franklin calculated that if every 
man and woman should spend three or four hours each 
day in useful occupation, poverty would disappear, and 
the afternoon of each day and the whole afternoon of our 
lives could be reserved for physical, mental, or spiritual 
improvement. That we cannot thus have the afternoon 
to ourselves is due to the fact that we are paying our 
neighbor's debts. Our neighbor has taken our time. 
We are doing more than our share of the drudgery that 
hinders growth, and this because others in the same 
community are doing too little for their own develop- 
ment. 

The end of the social organism is fullness of life for the 
individual. The forms of society avail nothing if they do 
not bring larger life to the individual units. Whatever 
is not good for the individual man, cannot be good for 
humanity. 

We hear every day allusions to the wrongs of labor, 
to the justice which never comes to the poor man, and 
to the favor which always follows the rich. We hear 
of the industrial crimes by which the rich grow richer and 
the poor grow poorer. We see every day the advertise- 
ments of the poor man's friend, paid for out of the poor 
man's money, and all of them seem to tell the same 
story. It is the desire of the poor man's friend to 
handle the poor man's money, and his chief quaHfica- 
tion is the fact that he has never yet shown any skill in 
handling his own. 

We know very well that these wrongs of labor are not 
imaginary. It happens too often that those who are 



INDUSTRIAL WAR. 241 

within may bar tne doors against those who are without. 
We know, too, that under human laws it too often occurs 
that those the world calls fortunate have the luck of foxes 
and wolves, and can show no moral claim to the game 
they are devouring. 

Much that we call money-making is not the addition 
of wealth. It is money-transferring, not money-gaining. 
It is the process of making slaves of others, by turning 
into the pocket of the one that which is rightfully earned 
by the brains or the hands of others. Some day this 
manner of * * making money, ' ' whether practiced by the 
''predatory rich," or the equally "predatory poor," 
will become impossible. It will pass under the ban as 
blackmail and highway robbery have passed. When it 
is condemned by public opinion the law will condemn it, 
too; for our statutes are only attempts at the formal 
expression of such opinion. Industrial warfare is not 
competition. It is the struggle of devices to stifle com- 
petition. Competition is rivalry, to be sure, but rivalry 
under conditions of fair play. Its function is to secure 
the best service — to put the right man in the right 
place. That one man should devour another is not 
competition. It is war. The abolition of private warfare 
within a nation has been one of the most important steps 
in human civilization. The abolition of private war in 
industrial relations will be another step scarcely lower in 
importance. But this must come with the growth of 
human wisdom, by which destructive and dishonest prac- 
tices may be condemned. It cannot be brought about by 
the application of force. It cannot follow any form of 
arbitrary legislation. All statutes must be of equal appli- 
cation; for in taking away from the barons, of whatever 

Q 



242 THE SAVING OF TIME. 

kind — feudal or industrial, — the right of private war, 
the people are bound to guarantee that private war shall 
not be waged against them. 

With all that may be said of the injustice of our social 
order, there are not many whose place in it is not fixed 
by their own character and training. In America to-day 
most men find that the position awarded them is the 
only one possible. Accident and misfortune aside, not 
many are poor who could ever have been otherwise. To 
Robinson Crusoe alone on his desert island, as Dr. 
Warner has shown, most forms of misery we know could 
have come if he had developed their causes. Weakness 
and poverty are not wholly caused by social condi- 
tions. Even with no social system at all, folly, vice, 
or crime will always bring weakness, misery, poverty. 
Misery, in general, is nature's protest against personal 
degradation. No man needs the help of others in order 
to degrade himself 

To be poor in worldly goods is not all of poverty. 
Such poverty may be in itself no evil. Wealth is a 
costly thing. Many a man is poor because he has 
intelligently refused to pay the price of wealth. He has 
turned his time and effort into channels which brought 
him spiritual or mental rather than economic gain. But 
such as these are satisfied with their bargain, and not one 
of them is aware that any wrong has been done to him. 
He has what he has paid for, and asks for nothing else ; 
and we who know him as our neighbor never think of 
him as poor. He could only wish for wealth as a means 
of securing a more perfect poverty. 

* ' The gods for labor give us all good things, ' ' but not 
all to the same man. Each must choose for himself. 



THE RICH AND THE POOR. 243 

and it is a happy condition that each one who has earned 
the right to choose is satisfied with his choice. Those 
who have not earned this right must, from the nature 
of things, be discontented. The man who has wasted 
his time must take the last choice. He comes in for the 
little that is left. With the leisure of life all spent in 
advance, the interest on borrowed time must be paid 
under the hardest of creditors. 

A great problem of our day, which engages the best 
thoughts of the strongest minds, is this: How can the 
power of self-support be restored to those who have lost 
it ? How are those who swim on the crest of the wave 
to lend a hand to the submerged tenth who struggle 
ineffectively in waters which only grow deeper as our 
civilization moves on? What can the strong do for 
the weak? 

**The rich man," it is often said, ''must know how 
the poor man lives," for in keeping together is the safety 
of humanity. But even more pertinent than this is the 
other saying, that, in his turn, "the poor man must 
learn to know how the rich man works." It is true 
enough that there are among us some rich men who 
never work, some few supported splendidly in idleness, 
at public cost, the reward of the good fortune, or the 
hard work, or the successful trickery of some ancestor. 
These gilded paupers are not many in America, after all, 
— some ''four hundred," are there not, in each of our 
great cities ? And the number is not increasing; for their 
hold on inherited power grows constantly weaker. They 
are but froth on the waves of humanity, and the burden 
of carrying them is not one of the heaviest the American 
citizen has to bear. Their life in our country is an 



m.. 



244 THE SAVING OF TIME. 

anachronism, as they themselves are not slow to recog- 
nize. Their place, and their time, is in feudal Europe, 
and not in the America of to-day. 

In the old times the poor man worked, and the rich 
man was idle; the poor man paid the taxes which sup- 
ported the gentleman in pauperism. *'The rich," 
indeed, "grew richer, and the poor poorer." The 
poor man worked on with an ever-decreasing vitality, 
because work absorbed his strength, and he could not 
direct his own forces. Work without self-consent is not 
growth, but slavery. In like manner, the rich man 
slipped into degeneracy, because his existence was pur- 
poseless, and he was conscious of no need of self-support. 
The man of leisure, whether rich or poor, is in the body 
politic like carbonic acid in the air — it supports neither 
combustion nor respiration. His presence is poisonous, 
though in himself he may be productive of neither harm 
nor good. 

There are some rich men, however, who have the right 
to be rich. They have paid the price, and they are en- 
titled to enjoy their bargain. He who saves the toil 
of a thousand men has a right to some share of their 
earnings. Sooner or later, we may be sure, this share 
will be no more and no less than has been fairly earned. 
The forces of nature are hemmed in by no patent. No 
man can have a perpetual monopoly; and, sooner or 
later, the knowledge of the one becomes the property 
of all. 

The power of capital does not lie in its own force, but 
in the force of the brains which must, sooner or later, 
take possession of it, and to which labor undirected by 
mind must ever stand in the relation of a slave. Money 



CAPITAL AND BRAINS. 245 

alone has no power. * * The fool and his money are soon 
parted." Capital is only an instrument. It is effective 
only when it represents a single will in action. The 
decision of one man has greater force than the feeble 
or clashing desires of thousands. 

It is not true that wealth is the result of "labor ap- 
plied to the forces of nature." The gaining of wealth 
is the result of wise direction or of skillful manipulation. 
In the long run, the majority of employers of labor are 
eaten out of house and home by employees who have 
no stake in the result, and, therefore, nothing to lose 
from failure. 

The little boy in the child's story* says: 

"My feet, they haul me round the house; 
They hoist me up the stairs; 
I only have to steer them, and 
They ride me every wheres." 

The average man's view of capital is of the same kind. 
He underestimates the importance of the steering part 
of the work, without which no labor yields wealth, and 
without which capital is ineffective. If he understood 
the value of wise direction of effort he would cease to be 
an average man. 

The industrial dangers which threaten our country 
come not primarily from the power of the rich, but 
from the weakness of the poor. Too often the poor are 
taking to themselves a leisure which they have never 
earned. The price they have paid in life is the price of 
poverty. If part of it goes for whisky and tobacco, the 
rest must go for rags and dirt. Even the lowest reward 
of labor well spent will buy a happy home. But, with- 

*From "The Lark," San Francisco. 



246 THE SAVING OF TIME. 

out frugality and temperance, no rate of wages and no 
division of profits can avail to save a man from poverty; 
and the waste of one man injures not only himself, but 
carries harm to all his neighbors, joined to him in dis- 
astrous industrial alliance. 

We are told that ''poverty is the relentless hell" 
that yawns beneath civil society. So it is; and a sim- 
ilar comparison may be made in the case of the penalty 
which follows the violation of any other law of ethics 
and economics. ' * By their long memories the gods are 
known." Under their laws we live, and beneath us 
forever yawn their penalties. But we may change this 
metaphor a little. May it not be that this yawning, 
' ' relentless hell, ' ' is due in part to the presence among 
us of the yawning, relentless horde of men who would 
gain something for nothing? In whatever form of in- 
dustry this influence is felt, it must come as industrial 
depression. 

The essential cause of poverty is the failure to adapt 
means to ends. A woman in the Tennessee mountains 
explained once the condition of the * ' poor whites ' ' in 
these words : * ' Poor folks have poor ways. ' ' That 
their ways are poor is the cause of their economic weak- 
ness. And again it is written : ' ' The destruction of the 
poor is their poverty." Without skill to bring about 
favorable results, the poor are constantly victims of cir- 
cumstances. These conditions of their lives lead to 
reduced vitality, lowered morality, and loss of self- 
respect. Effective life demands, as Huxley tells us, 
* * absolute veracity of thought and action. ' ' Those who 
lack this will always be poor, whatever our social or 
industrial conditions, unless they become slaves to the 



THE POOR AND THEIR WAYS. 247 

will of others, or unless their weakness be placed as a 
burden on collective effort. It is certainly true that, 
even though each man in America were industrious 
to the full measure of his powers, the poor would still 
' ' be with us. ' ' There will always be impracticable and 
incapable men, those who put forth effort enough, but 
who can do nothing for others that others are likely 
to value. There will still be the sick and the broken, 
the weak and the unfortunate. But if these were our 
only poor, all men would be their neighbors. Statis- 
tics have shown that, of ten persons in distress in our 
great cities, the condition of six is due to intemper- 
ance, idleness, or vice, three to old age and weakness 
following a thriftless or improvident youth, and one to 
sickness, accident, or loss of work. The unfortunate 
poor are but a small fraction of the great pauperism. 
Were there no pretenders, all who travel on the road to 
Jericho should be Good Samaritans. Why not ? The 
impulse to charity is the common instinct of humanity; 
but the priest and Levite of our day have been so many 
times imposed upon that all distress is viewed with sus- 
picion. The semblance of misfortune is put on for the 
sake of the oil, and the wine, and the pieces of silver. 
We ' ' pass by on the other side ' ' because in our times 
we have learned that even common charity may become 
a crime. We have seen the man who has * * fallen by the 
wayside" put vitriol in his children's eyes that their 
distress may appeal to us yet more strongly. We have 
learned that to give food to starving children thereby 
helps to condemn them to a life of misery and crime. 
To give something for nothing is to help destroy the 
possibility of self- activity. And money gained without 



248 THE SAVING OF TIME. 

effort is ill-gotten gain. A blind man, to whom some 
one offered money, once said: "We should never give 
money to a blind man; for he needs all the strength he 
can have to help him compete with men who can see. ' ' 
Ill-timed help destroys the rationality of life. If the 
laws of life were changed so that the fool and his money 
were less easily parted, money would be wasted still 
more foolishly than now. 

Money given outright is as dangerous as a gift of 
opium, and its results are not altogether different. Only 
the very strong can receive it with safety. Only the very 
earnest can repay with interest the loans of the gods. 
Unearned rewards cut the nerve of future effort. The 
man who receives a windfall forever after watches the 
wind. There is but one good fortune to the earnest man. 
This is opportunity; and sooner or later opportunity will 
come to him who can make use of it. Undeserved help 
brings the germs of idleness. Even nature is too generous 
for perfect justice. She gives to vagabonds enough to 
perpetuate vagabondage. 

The strength of New England lay in this — that on 
her rocky hills only the industrious man could make a 
living, and with the years the habit of industry became 
ingrained in the New England character. This strength 
to-day is seen wherever New England influences have 
gone. The great West was built with the savings of 
New England. Go to the prairies of Iowa, where the 
earth gives her choicest bounty for the least effort, over 
and over again you will find that these rich farms bear 
mortgages given to some farmer on the Massachusetts 
hills. The poor land of the mountains, worked by a 
man who gave his time and his work, yields enough to 



THE FREEDOM OF THE FARMER. 249 

pay for the rich land, too. The Iowa farmer must work 
with equal diligence if he is to hold his own against the 
competition of Massachusetts. 

Not long ago, I crossed the State of Indiana on the 
railway train. It makes no difference where or in what 
direction. It was a bright day in April, when the sun 
shone on the damp earth, and when one could almost 
hear the growing of the grass. There are days and days 
like this, which every farm boy can remember — days 
which brought to him the delight of living; but to the 
thrifty farmer these days brought also their duties of 
plowing, and planting, and sowing. The hope of the 
spring was in all this work, and no one thought of it as 
drudgery. The days were all too short for the duties 
which crowded, and the right to rest could only come 
when the grain was in the ground, where the forces of 
nature might wake it into life. An hour in the grow- 
ing spring is worth a week in the hot midsummer; and 
he must be a poor farmer, indeed, who does not realize 
this. 

And I thought that day of the freedom of the farmer. 
He trades with nature through no middle-man. Nowhere 
is forethought and intelligence better paid than in deal- 
ings with Mother Nature. She is as honest as eternity, 
and she never fails to meet the just dues of all who have 
claims upon her. She returns some fifty-fold, some hun- 
dred-fold, for all that is intrusted to her; never fifty-fold 
to him who deserves a hundred. 

Just then the train stopped for a moment at a flag- 
station — a village called Cloverdale, a name suggestive of 
sweet blossoms and agricultural prosperity. A commer- 
cial traveler, dealing in groceries and tobacco, got off; a 



250 THE SAVING OF TIME. 

crate of live chickens was put on, and the cars started 
again. The stopping of a train was no rare event in 
that village; for it happens two or three times every day. 
The people had no welcome for the commercial traveler, 
no tears were shed over the departure of the chickens; 
yet on the station steps I counted forty men and boys 
who were there when the train came in. Farm boys, 
who ought to have been at work in the fields; village 
boys, who might have been doing something somewhere 

— every interest of economics and aesthetics alike calling 
them away from the station and off to the farms. 

Two men attended to the business of the station. The 
solitary traveler went his own way. The rest were there 
because they had not the moral strength to go anywhere 
else. They were there on the station steps, dead to all 
life and hope, with only force enough to stand around 
and ** gape." 

At my destination I left the train, and going to the 
hotel, I passed on a street corner the noisy vender of a 
rheumatism cure. Sixty men and boys who had no 
need for cures of any kind — for they were already dead 

— were standing around with mouths open and brains 
shut, engaged in killing time. I was sorry to see that 
many of these were farmers. All this time their neg- 
lected farms lay bathed in the sunlight, the earth ready 
to rejoice at the touch of a hoe. 

Not long ago I had occasion to cross a village square. 
I saw many busy men upon it, men who had a right to 
be there, because they were there on their own business. 
Each one takes part in the great task of caring for the 
world when he is able and willing to care for himself. 
On the corner of the square a wandering vagrant, with a 



THE BIRDLIME OF HABITUAL IDLENESS. 251 

cracked accordion, set forth strains of doleful music. The 
people stood around him, like flies around a drop of mo- 
lasses. An hour later I returned. The accordion and 
its victims were still there, as if chained to the spot. 
The birdlime of habitual idleness was on their feet, and 
they could not get away. They will never get away. 
The mark of doom is on them. They will stay there 
forever. 

In these days, the farmer and the workingman have 
many grievances of which they did not know a genera- 
tion ago. The newspapers and the stump-speakers tell 
us of these wrongs, and, from time to time, huge unions 
and alliances are formed to set them right. I go back to 
the old farm in Western New York on which I was born 
— the farm my father won from the forest, and on which 
he lived in freedom and independence, knowing no mas- 
ter, dreading no oppression. I find on that farm to-day 
tenants who barely make a living. I go over the farm; 
I see unpruned fruit trees, wasted forest trees, farm im- 
plements rusting in the rain and sun, falling gates, broken 
wagons, evidences of wasted time and unthrifty labor. 
When one sees such things, he must ask how much of 
the oppression of the farmer is the fault of the times and 
how much is the fault of the man. 

It may be in part the poorness of his ways, rather than 
the aggression of hi? neighbors, which has plunged him 
into poverty. In very truth, it is both; but the one may 
be the cause of the other. It is only the born slave that 
can be kept in slavery. If a farmer spend a day in the 
harvest-time in efforts to send a fool to the Legisla- 
ture, or a knave to Congress, should he complain if the 
laws the fools and knaves make add to his own taxes ? 



252 THE SAVING OF TIME. 

If he stand all day in the public square spellbound by 
a tramp with an accordion; or, still worse, if he lounge 
about on the sawdust floor of a saloon, talking the stuff 
we agree to call politics, never reading a book, never 
thinking a thought above the level of the sawdust floor, 
need he be surprised if his opinions do not meet with 
respect ? 

I can well remember the time when the farmer was 
a busy man. There is many a farm to-day on which he 
is still busy. It does not take a close observer to recog- 
nize these farms. You can tell them as far as you can 
see. Their owners are in alliance with the forces of 
nature. The gods are on their side, and they only ask 
from politicians that they keep out of their sunlight. 
Their butter sells for money; their oats are clean; their 
horses are in demand; whatever they touch is genuine 
and prosperous. The cattle call the farmer up at dawn ; 
the clover needs him in the morning; the apples and 
potatoes in the afternoon; the corn must be husked at 
night. A busy man the successful farmer is. Being 
busy, he finds time for everything. He reads * * bound 
books "; he enjoys the pleasures of travel; he educates 
his family; he keeps intelligent watch on the affairs of the 
day. He does not find time to stand on the station steps 
in the middle of the afternoon to watch a thousand trains 
go by on a thousand consecutive days. He carries no 
handicap load of tobacco and whisky. He goes to the 
county-seat when he has business there. He goes with 
clean clothes, and comes back with a clean conscience. 
He has not time to spend each seventh day on the court- 
house square talking the dregs of scandal and politics 
with men whose highest civic conception is balanced by 



THE TAX OF SHIFTLESSNESS. 253 

a two-dollar bill; nor has he time to waste on nostrum- 
venders or vagrants with accordions. 

I hear the farmers complaining — and most justly com- 
plaining — of high taxes; but no duty on iron was ever 
so great as the tax he pays who leaves his mowing- 
machine unsheltered in the storm. The tax on land is 
high; but he pays a higher tax who leaves his meadows to 
grow up to whiteweed and thistles. The tax for good 
roads is high; but a higher toll is paid by the farmer who 
goes each week to town in mud knee-deep to his horses. 
There is a high tax on personal property; but it is not 
so high as the tax on time which is paid by the man 
who spends his Saturdays loitering about the village 
streets, or playing games of chance in some * ' dead-fall ' ' 
saloon. 

Mowing-machines, thrashers, harvesters, and all the 
array of labor-saving contrivances of an altruistic age 
serve nothing if they are not rightly used. They are 
burdens, not helps, if the time they save be not taken in 
further production. Labor-saving machinery becomes 
the costliest of luxuries if the time it saves be turned into 
idleness or dissipation. 

I know a hundred farmers in Southern Indiana who 
lose regularly one-sixth of their time by needless visits 
to the county-seat, and in making these visits needlessly 
long. The farmer's time is his capital; its use is his 
income. One-sixth of his time means one-sixth of his 
income, or else his whole time is not worth saving. It 
is this sixth which represents the difference between 
poverty and prosperity. If this wasted sixth were saved 
by every farmer in Indiana, the State would be an 
industrial paradise. To have lived in Indiana would 



254 THE SAVING OF TIME. 

be an education in itself. People would come from the 
ends of the earth to see the land which has solved the 
labor question. 

But it may be that their own valuation is a just one. 
Perhaps there are some farmers whose time has no 
economic value. There are other such in every com- 
munity and in every line in life. The idiot, the insane, 
the broken, the dilettante^ the criminal. For some of 
these great hospitals are maintained, because they can 
be more cheaply supported in public lodgings at the 
common cost. Shall we add the weary farmer to this list? 
Why not have a great State hospital for all men whose 
time is worthless — a great square courtyard, covered 
with sawdust, with comfortable dry-goods boxes, where 
they might sit for the whole day, and the whole year, 
talking politics or "playing pedro" to the music of the 
hand-organ, watching the trains go by? The rest of the 
world could then go on with the world' s work, with some 
addition, no doubt, to the taxes, but with corresponding 
gain in having the streets open, the saloons closed, the 
demagogue silenced, and the pastures free from weeds 
and thistles. 

The frost is a great economic agent as a spur to human 
activity. There are lands where the frost never comes, 
and where not one-sixth, but six-sixths, of the time of 
almost every man is devoted to any purpose rather than 
that of attending to his own affairs. It is nature's great 
hospital for the incurably lazy. The motto of the tropics 
is summed up in one word, ' * Manana, " " to-morrow. ' ' 
To-morrow let us do it; we must eat and sleep to-day. 
"Manana por la manana," one hears over and over 
agam at every suggestion involving the slightest effort. 



THE LAND OF TO-MORROW. 255 

It is too warm to-day; the sunshine is too bright; the 
shade too pleasant; — " Manana " let it be. This is the 
land v/here nothing- is ever done. " Why should we do 
things when to rest and not to do is so much pleasanter ? 
There is the endless succession of to-morrows. They 
have come on to us since eternity, and surely they will 
continue to come. Let us rest in the shade, and wait 
for the next to-morrow. ' ' 

I have not meant that one word of this should be a 
special criticism of the American farmer. It is still 
broadly true that the farmers as a class are the sanest of 
our people, the least infected by follies and with most 
faith in the natural relations of cause and effect. The 
farmers have not yet come to feel that their advancement 
must be assured through the repression of others. They 
have not yet turned from nature to legislation in their 
search for wealth. The farmer deals with the earth 
directly. It is the earth, not society, that owes him a 
living. Of all callings, his is least related to the con- 
ventionalities of man. That he has scorned these con- 
ventionalities, that he has ' ' hated the narrow town and 
all its fashions," has been the source of some of his 
misfortunes. For the town is nearer the center of legis- 
lation, and it has not been slow to cast burdens upon 
others for its own purposes. But if the farmer is the 
victim of unequal taxation or of unjust discriminations, 
as he certainly is, it is his duty and his privilege to make 
matters right. Even though sometimes he acts bhndly 

— with the discrimination of the "bull in a china-shop," 

— as when he votes for bad roads, cheap men, cheap 
money, and crippled public schools, it is not a source 
of discouragement. Men in cities do even worse than 



256 THE SAVING OF TIME. 

this. The farmer will know better when he has looked 
more deeply into the matter. But whatever the repeal 
of bad legislation may do, the primal necessity remains. 

*' He who by the plow would thrive, 
Himself must either hold or drive." 

Whoever will prosper in any line of life must save his 
own time and do his own thinking. He must spend 
neither time nor money which he has not earned. He 
must not do in a poor way what others do in a better. 
The change of worse men for better is always painful — 
it is often cruel. But it must come. The remedy is to 
make men better, so that there need be no change. 

The rise of the common man which has been going 
on all these centuries demands that the common man 
must rise. This is the ' ' change from status to con- 
tract," to use the words of Sir Henry Mayne, which is 
the essential fact in modern progress. But this rise has 
its sorrows as well as its joys. Man cannot use the 
powers and privileges of civilization without sharing its 
responsibilities. 

In the progress of civilization every form of labor 
must tend to become a profession. The brain must con- 
trol the hand. The advance of civilization means the 
dominance of brain. It means the elimination of un- 
skilled work. The man who does not know, nor care 
to know, how farming is carried on, cannot remain a 
farmer. Whatever human laws may do, the laws of the 
gods will not leave him long in possession of the ground. 
If he does not know his business, he must let go of the 
earth, which will be taken by some one who does. In 
the words of a successful farmer whom I know, * ' Let 



TIME AND ETERNITY 257 

Other people's affairs alone, mind your own business, and 
you will have prosperity. ' ' If not in the fullest measure, 
it will still be all that you have paid for, and thus all that 
you deserve. 

I have wished to teach a single lesson, true alike to 
all men, — the lesson of the saving of time. 

To you, as students, I may say: The pathway of your 
lives lies along the borders of the Land of Manana. It 
is easy to turn into it and to lose yourselves among its 
palms and bananas. That thus far in your lives you are 
still on the right way is shown by your presence here 
to-day. Were it not so, you would be here to-morrow. 
You would wait for your education till the day that never 
comes. 

Different men have different powers. To come to the 
full measure of these powers, constitutes success in life. 
But power is only relative. It depends on the factor of 
time. With time enough, we could, any of us, do any- 
thing. With this great multiplier, it matters little what 
the other factor is. Any man would be all men, could 
he have time enough. With time enough, all things 
would be possible. With eternity, man becomes as the 
gods. But our time on earth is not eternity. We can 
do but little at the most. And the grim humorist 
reminds us * ' we shall be a long time dead. ' ' So every 
hour we waste carries away its life, as the drop of falling 
water carries away the rock. Every lost day takes away 
its cubit from our stature. 

So let us work while yet it is day, and when the even- 
ing falls we may rest under the shade of the palm-trees. 
He who has been active has earned the right to sleep; 
and when we have finished our appointed work, * ' the 



258 THE SAVING OF TIME. 

rest is silence." The toilsome, busy earth on which the 
strength of our lives has been spent shall be taken away 
from us. It shall be "rolled away like a scroll," giving 
place to that eternity which has no limit, nor environ- 
ment, and whose glory is past all understanding. 



XVII. 
THE NEW UNIVERSITY.* 

WE come together to-day for the first time as 
teachers and students. With this relation the 
Hfe of the Leland Stanford Junior University begins. It 
is such personal contact of young men and young women 
with scholars and investigators which constitutes the life 
of the university. It is for us as teachers and students 
in the university's first year to lay the foundations of a 
school which may last as long as human civilization. 
Ours is the youngest of the universities, but it is heir to 
the wisdom of all the ages, and with this inheritance it 
has the promise of a rapid and sturdy growth. 

Our university has no history to fall back upon; no 
memories of great teachers haunt its corridors; in none 
of its rooms appear the traces which show where a great 
man has lived or worked. No tender associations cling, 
ivy-like, to its fresh, new walls. It is hallowed by no 
traditions. It is hampered by none. Its finger-posts 
still point forward. Traditions and associations it is ours 
to make. From our work the future of the university 
will grow, as the splendid lily from the modest bulb. 

But the future, with its glories and its responsibilities, 
will be in other hands. It is ours at the beginning to 
give the University its form, its tendencies, its customs. 
The power of precedent will cause to be repeated over 

* President's Address, Opening Day of the Leland Stanford Junior Uni- 
versity, October i, 1891. 

259 



26o THE NEW UNIVERSITY, 

and over again everything that we do — our errors as 
well as our wisdom. It becomes us, then, to begin the 
work modestly, as under the eye of the coming ages. 
We must lay the foundations broad and firm, so as to 
give full support to whatever edifice the future may 
build. Ours is the humbler task, but not the least in 
importance, and our work will not be in vain if all that 
we do is done in sincerity. As sound as the rocks from 
which these walls are hewn should be the work of every 
teacher who comes within them. To the extent that this 
is true will the university be successful. Unless its work 
be thus "wrought in a sad sincerity," nothing can redeem 
it from failure. In this feeling, and realizing, too, that 
only the help we give to the men and women whose lives 
we reach can justify our presence here, we are ready to 
begin our work. 

We hope to give to our students the priceless legacy 
of the educated man, the power of knowing what really 
is. The higher education should bring men into direct 
contact with truth. It should help to free them from the 
dead hands of old traditions and to enable them to form 
opinions worthy of the new evidence each new day 
brings before them. An educated man should not be 
the slave of the past, not a copy of men who have gone 
before him. He must be in some degree the founder of 
a new intellectual dynasty; for each new thinker is a new 
type of man. Whatever is true is the truest thing in the 
universe, and mental and moral strength alike come from 
our contact with it. 

Every influence which goes out from these halls should 
emphasize the value of truth. The essence of scholar- 
ship is to know something which is absolutely true; to 



THE VALUE OF TRUTH, 261 

have, in the words of Huxley, * ' some knowledge to the 
certainty of which no authority could add nor take away 
one jot nor tittle, and to which the tradition of a thou- 
sand years is but as the hearsay of yesterday." The 
scholar, as was once said of our great chemist, Benjamin 
Silliman, must have ** faith in truth as truth, faith that 
there is a power in the universe good enough to make 
truth-telling safe, and strong enough to make truth- 
telling effective." The personal influence of genuine- 
ness, as embodied in the life of a teacher, is one of the 
strongest moral forces which the school can bring to its 
aid; for moral training comes not mainly by precept, but 
by practice. We may teach the value of truth to our 
students by showing that we value it ourselves. 

In like manner, the value of right living can be taught 
by right examples. In the words of a wise teacher,* 
' ' Science knows no source of life but life. The teacher 
is one of the accredited delegates of civilization. In 
Heine's phrase, he is a Knight of the Holy Ghost. If 
virtue and integrity are to be propagated, they must be 
propagated by people who possess them. If this child- 
world about us that we know and love is to grow up into 
righteous manhood and womanhood, it must have a 
chance to see how righteousness looks when it is lived. 
That this may be so, what task have we but to garrison 
our State with men and women? If we can do that, 
if we can have in every square mile in our country a man 
or woman whose total influence is a civilizing power, we 
shall get from our educational system all it can give and 
all that we can desire. " So we may hope that this new 
school will do its part in the work of civilization, side by 

* Professor William Lowe Bryan. 



262 THE NEW UNIVERSITY. 

side with her elder sister, the University of the State, 
and in perfect harmony with every agency which makes 
for right thinking and right living. The harvest is 
bounteous, but laborers are still all too few; for a gen- 
erous education should be the birthright of every man 
and woman in America. 

I shall not try to-day to give you our ideal of what a 
university should be. If our work is successful, our 
ideals will appear in the daily life of the school. In a 
school, as in a fortress, it is not the form of the building, 
but the strength of the materials, which determine its 
effectiveness. With a garrison of hearts of oak, it may 
not matter even whether there be a fortress. Whatever 
its form, or its organization, or its pretensions, the char- 
acter of the university is fixed by the men who teach, 
" Have a university in shanties, nay in tents," Cardinal 
Newman has said, ' ' but have great teachers in it. ' ' The 
university spirit flows out from these teachers, and its 
organization serves mainly to bring them together. 
' ' Colleges can only serve us, ' ' says Emerson, ' ' when 
their aim is not to drill, but to create ; when they 
gather from far every ray of various genius to their 
hospitable halls, and by their concentrated fires set the 
heart of their youth in flame. ' ' Strong men make uni- 
versities strong. A great man never fails to leave a 
great mark on every youth with whom he comes in con- 
tact. Too much emphasis cannot be laid on this: that 
the real purpose of the university organization is to pro- 
duce a university atmosphere — such an atmosphere as 
gathered itself around Arnold at Rugby, around Dollin- 
ger at Munich, around Linnaeus at Upsala, around 
Werner at Freiburg, around Agassiz at Cambridge, 



INFLUENCE OF GREAT TEACHERS. 263 

around Mark Hopkins at Williamstown, around Andrew 
D. White at Ithaca, around all great teachers everywhere. 

A professor to whom original investigation is unknown 
should have no place in a university. Men of common- 
place or second-hand scholarship are of necessity men 
of low ideals, however much the fact may be disguised. 
A man of high ideals must be an investigator. He 
must know and think for himself Only such as do 
this can be really great as teachers. Some day our uni- 
versities will recognize that their most important pro- 
fessors may be men who teach no classes, devoting their 
time and strength wholly to advanced research. Their 
presence and example will be, perhaps, worth to the 
student body a hundred-fold more than the precepts and 
drill of the others. They set high standards of thought. 
They help to create the university spirit, without which 
any college is but a grammar school of a little higher 
pretensions. 

And above and beyond all learning is the influence 
of character, the impulse to virtue and piety which 
comes from men whose lives show that virtue and piety 
really exist. For the life of the most exalted as weU 
as the humblest of men, there can be nobler motto than 
that inscribed by the great scholar of the last century 
over his home at Hammarby : " Innocue vivito ; numen 
adesf Live blameless; God is near. ''This," said 
Linnaeus, ''is the wisdom of my life." Every advance 
which we make toward the realization of the truth of the 
permanence and immanence of law, brings us nearer 
to Him who is the great First Cause of all law and all 
phenomena. 

While the work of the teachers must make the kernel 



264 THE NEW UNIVERSITY. 

of the university, we must rejoice that here at Palo Alto 
even the husks are beautiful. Beauty and fitness are 
great forces in education. Every object with which the 
young mind comes in contact leaves on it its trace. 
*' Nothing is unimportant in the life of man," and the 
least feature of our surroundings has its influence, greater 
or less. * ' There was a child went forth every day, ' ' 
Walt Whitman tells us, ''and the first object that it 
looked upon, that object it became," It may be for 
a moment or an hour, or ' ' for changing cycles of years. ' ' 
The essence of civilization is exposure to refining and 
humanizing influences. * ' A dollar in a university, ' * 
Emerson tells us, * ' is worth more than a dollar in a 
jail," and every dollar spent in making a university 
beautiful will be repaid with interest in the enriching of 
the students' lives. 

It has been a reproach of America that for the best 
of her sons and daughters she has done the least. She 
has built palaces for lunatics, idiots, crippled, and blind, 
— nay, even for criminals and paupers. But the college 
students — "the young men of sound mind and earnest 
purpose, the noblest treasures of the State, ' ' to quote 
the words of President White, * ' she has housed in vile 
barracks." The student has no need for luxury. Plain 
living has ever gone with high thinking. But grace 
and fitness have an educative power too often forgotten 
in this utilitarian age. These long corridors with their 
stately arches, these circles of waving palms, will have 
their part in the students' training as surely as the chem- 
ical laboratory or the seminary-room. Each stone in 
the quadrangle shall teach its lesson of grace and of 
genuineness, and this Valley of Santa Clara — the valley 



THE BEAUTY OF PALO ALTO. 265 

of ' ' holy clearness ' ' — shall occupy a warm place in every 
student's heart. Pictures of this fair region will cHng 
to his memory amid the figures of draughting-room. 
He will not forget the fine waves of our two mountain 
ranges, overarched by a soft blue Grecian sky, nor the 
ancient oak-trees, nor the gently sloping fields, changing 
from vivid green to richest yellow, as the seasons change. 
The noble pillars of the gallery of art, its rich treasures, 
the choicest remains of the ideals of past ages — all these 
and a hundred other things which each one will find out 
for himself, shall fill his mind with bright pictures, never 
to be rubbed out in the wear of hfe. Thus in the char- 
acter of every student shall be left some imperishable 
trace of the beauty of Palo Alto. 

Agassiz once said: ''The physical suffering of human- 
ity, the wants of the poor, the craving of the hungry 
and naked, appeal to the sympathies of every one who 
has a human heart. But there are necessities which only 
the destitute student knows. There is a hunger and 
thirst which only the highest charity can understand and 
relieve; and on this solemn occasion let me say that every 
dollar given for higher education, in whatever depart- 
ment of knowledge, is likely to have a greater influence 
on the future character of our nation than even the 
thousands, hundred thousands, and milHons which we 
have spent, or are spending, to raise the many to material 
ease and comfort." 

I need not recall to you the history of the foundation 
of the Leland Stanford Junior University. It has its 
origin in the shadow of a great sorrow, and its purpose 
in the wish to satisfy for the coming generations the hun- 
ger and thirst after knowledge — that undying curiosity 



266 THE NEW UNIVERSITY, 

which is the best gift of God to man. The influence of 
the boy, to the nobility of whose short Hfe the Leland 
Stanford Junior University is a tribute and a remem- 
brance, will never be lost in our country. To him we 
owe the inspiration which led the founders to devote the 
earnings of the successful ventures of a busy life to the 
work of higher education. 

Six years ago, in one of our California journals,* these 
words were used with reference to the work which we 
begin to-day: " Greater than the achievement of lasting 
honor among one's fellow-men of later generations, is it 
to become a living power among them forever. It rarely 
happens to one man and woman to have both the power 
and the skill to thus live after death, working and shap- 
ing beneficently in the lives of many — not of tens nor 
of hundreds, but of thousands and of tens of thousands, 
as the generations follow on. Herein is the wisdom of 
money spent in education, that each recipient of influ- 
ence becomes in his time a center to transmit the same 
in every direction, so that it multiplies forever in geo- 
metric ratio. This power to mold unborn generations 
for good, to keep one's hands mightily on human affairs 
after the flesh has been dust for years, seems not only 
more than mortal, but more than man. Thus does man 
become co-worker with God in the shaping of the world 
to a good outcome.'* 

The Golden Age of California begins when its gold is 
used for purposes like this. From such deeds must rise 
the new California of the the coming century, no longer 
the California of the gold-seeker and the adventurer, but 
the abode of high-minded men and women, trained in 

* Milicent W. Shinn, in The Overland Monthly. 



THE GOLDEN AGE OF CALIFORNIA. 267 

the wisdom of the ages, and imbued with the love of 
nature, the love of man, and the love of God. And 
bright indeed will be the future of our State if, in the 
usefulness of the university, every hope and prayer of 
the founders shall be realized. 



XVIII. 
A CASTLE IN SPAIN. 

T KNOW a castle, in the Heart of Spain, 
Builded of stone, as if to stand for aye, 
With tile roof, red against the aztcre sky, — 
For skies are bluest in the Heart of Spai?i. 
So fair a castle men bidld not again ; 
^ Neath its broad arches, in its courtyard fair, 
And through its cloisters — ope7t everywhere — 
/ wander as I will, in sun or rain. 
Its inmost secrets luito vie are know7i. 
For mine the castle is. Nor mifie alo?ie : 
' Tis thine, dear heart, to have and hold alway 
' Tis all the world^s, likewise, as ?nine and thine; 
For whoso passes through its gates shall say, 
'■'I dwelt within this castle: it is mine I ^^ 



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